​I grew up in a family that did not tell
the story. I am listening to it now:

Even the morning you see a robin
flattened on the street, you hear

another in a tree, the notes
they’ve taught each other, bird

before bird before we were born.
And elsewhere, the rusty bicycle

carries the doctor all the way
across an island. He arrives in time.

Somewhere his sister adds water
to the soup until payday. And

over the final hill in a Southwestern
desert, a gas station appears. No,

the grief has not forgotten my name,
but this morning I tied

my shoelaces. Outside I can force
a wave at every face who might

need it. We might
spin till we collapse, but we still

have a hub: Even at dusk,
the sun isn’t going anywhere.

We have lamps. The story insists
it just looks like there’s only

enough oil to last one night.

    - by Brad Aaron Modlin

​That sprinkler is at it again,
hissing and spitting its arc
of silver, and the parched
lawn is tickled green. The air
hums with the busy traffic
of butterflies and bees,
who navigate without lane
markers, stop signs, directional
signals. One of my friends
says we're now in the shady
side of the garden, having moved
past pollination, fruition,
and all that bee-buzzed jazz,
into our autumn days. But I say wait.
It's still summer, and the breeze is full
of sweetness spilled from a million petals;
it wraps around your arms, lifts the hair
from the back of your neck.  
The salvia, coreopsis, roses
have set the borders on fire,
and the peaches waiting to be picked
are heavy with juice. We are still ripening
into our bodies, still in the act of becoming.
Rejoice in the day's long sugar.
Praise that big fat tomato of a sun.
​
    - Barbara Crooker

Sweep the threshold,
unlock the door,
put the busyness away--
what comes is far
too important.
Build a fire,
quiet the house,
all your sensing is required.
Hear the hoof beats?
The full horse breaths?
Mice may scratch in the walls,
spiders rattle the roof,
you've nothing to do
but be home.
Movements beneath your skin,
flashes of thought,
quickening heart,
allow them.
This is a welcoming.
You don't know who approaches
only that they must.
Freedom blooms
as we set
a place for everything.
What you carry in your blood
has voice--
Let her sing.

​    - Willow Annan Rose

​​It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.
If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.

    - William Stafford

It is too easy to become overwhelmed
by the suffering in the world
and the only prayer one can muster
is for the qualities of surrender
be made visible
and soon

As the way dawn light
caresses our dreams
when we dare to raise our face
towards the hope of winterlight

When the end of the day arrives
we slip off the woolen cloak of sacrifice
so heavy it threatens
to tip over the chair
by the weight of it

Yes we have courted bitterness
the tannin lingering on our lips
but once we are no longer willing
to remain a prisoner to resentment

We begin to call back
the known
the true essence
of who we once were
before we became
victim to the unbearable

And this is the trial of love
that we are born to

This unspeakable price
we pay to dance
    such a short while to
    this earthly music
    in the deepest hours of night

So that we will emerge
    more light filled
    than before.

    - Kristy Hellum

​Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being search for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

    - Kabir, translation by Robert Bly

1. I once made a mix tape that was sixty minutes of "Jessie's Girl."  2. God, I
miss cassette tapes. I miss the hiss of unrequited love.  3. I miss being
fourteen and in love with, yes, my best friend's girlfriend.  4. I was in love
with her at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, as well. I was
in love with her for years after she broke up with my best friend.  5. When I
was twenty, and drinking my way into blackouts, I called her house. I was
too scared to talk to my beloved, who was away at college, but I needed to
confess to her mother.  6. But her father answered. It was four in the
morning.  7. "I'm in love with your daughter," I said.  8. "We know," he said.
He was amazingly polite despite the fact that I'd woken him at dawn-
thirty. He said, "You got lucky. She's here for the weekend. You want to talk
to her?"  9. I'm an indigenous American who has been in romantic love
with half a dozen white women.  10. And only one Indian woman.  11. And
yet, I think of my Indian wife and I as loving like Romeo and Juliet.
Because I grew up on one reservation as a tribal boy and she lived on a
dozen reservations as the daughter of a Bureau of Indian Affairs
superintendent.  12. If you don't understand that conflict, then you just
need to know that the BIA was originally located in the War Department.
13. I was one year sober when I met my wife. I've been sober ever since.  14.
Drunk for the white girls; sober for the Indian woman. Somebody needs to
write a song about that.

    - Sherman Alexie

Is the question from the back of the room; I cannot
Quite see the student asking it, but it’s deep-voiced
And challenging and I assume it’s a guy. Because I
Want to rub music and language together and gawk
At the flames, I say. Because poetry, if it takes fire,
Cracks people’s masks, and assaults arrogance, and
Sucks you beneath the surface of words towards why
We use them. Because we have been singing before
There ‘were’ words and it’s healthy to remember that.
Because the great poems are about you and me both
And there is damned little we will be able to discuss
In the normal flow of the river and it’s good for both
Of us to stand together quietly for a while in a poem.
Because why the hell not ? What is it exactly that we
Should count as time better spent ? You cannot spare
Two minutes for a poem ? Sure, it might be pompous
Arty muck, and you demand your two minutes back,
But what if it isn’t ? What if it shivers you, or startles
You awake, or makes you weep remembering a time
When you sang all day too, and everything was made
Of music and light and colors and slabs of shimmer ?
‘What if’, brother – that’s my answer to your question.

    - Brian Doyle

I watched a glint of morning sunlight
climbing a thread of spider's silk
in a gentle breeze. It shinnied up
from the tip of a dewy stalk of grass
to an overhanging branch, then
disappeared into the leaves. But soon
another followed, and then another,
glint after glint, and though they made
no sound, what I could see was music,
not melody but one clear, shining note
plucked over and over, as if the sun
were tuning the day, then handing it
to me so I could be the one to play it.

​    - Ted Kooser