A Poem…

 

The Wings of Daylight

Brightness appears showing us everything
it reveals the splendors it calls everything
but shows it to each of us alone
and only once and only to look at
not to touch or hold in our shadows
what we see is never what we touch
what we take turns out to be something else
what we see that one time departs untouched
while other shadows gather around us
the world’s shadows mingle with our own
we had forgotten them but they know us
they remember us as we always were
they were at home here before the first came
everything will leave us except the shadows
but the shadows carry the whole story
at first daybreak they open their long wings

 

William Stanley Merwin

 

 

From a recent hike. The poem, just because I rather like it.

  

Let Them Not Say

 

 

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

 

Jane Hirshfield

 

With thanks to the American poetry site that sends a poem a day.

More Found Words…

The Garden

Helen Hoyt

Do not fear.
The garden is yours
And it is yours to gather the fruits
And every flower of every kind,
And to set the high wall about it
And the closed gates.
The gates of your wall no hand shall open,
No feet shall pass,
Through all the days until your return.
Do not fear.

But soon,
Soon let it be, your coming!
For the pathways will grow desolate waiting,
The flowers say, “Our loveliness has no eyes to behold it!”
The leaves murmur all day with longing,
All night the boughs of the trees sway themselves with longing…

O Master of the Garden,
O my sun and rain and dew,
Come quickly.

 

(this is in the public domain from poets.org which sends a new poem every day. Some get deleted, some not.)

 

View of Lytton from across the river.

This post is dedicated to Joey, a ferociously loving dog who left his body behind this morning. And to his devoted companion who cared deeply for him.

 

Sometimes…

Sometimes

I go about pitying myself

While I am carried by

The Wind

Across the Sky

Chippewa Song

There have been a lot of versions of this short poem around, slightly paraphrased. It is one of those ubiquitous sayings that you see in new age bookstores and I have actually seen it attributed to all sorts of different sources. I honestly wonder if it is really a Chippewa song. This version is from a book of poetry, a collection of writings about the natural world. I don’t really care where it originates. And hopefully it doesn’t suffer from over use. I just rather like it.

(Mount Baker area, just off the side of the road.)

My teacher also says, with a certain frequency, that the Buddhas and Ancestors are always present in the world, helping all beings. And there is nothing that we can do about that.

I rather like to hear that too.

Grant and I are off to spend a bit of time out in the woods, I have my travel knitting packed. (Socks, lots of sock knitting. The holidays are coming and there are some in my acquaintance that appreciate the hand knit socks. That makes it very easy to knit for them.)

3KCBWDAY5 Something a Bit Different

Ode to my Socks

Maru Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

Pablo Neruda   1904 – 1973