The Summer Day
—Mary Oliver
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IS THAT YOU?
The jittering snow flakes chase one another
in flight from the knuckles of wind
that sway the abandoned branches of trees
in their inaudible dirge of loss
and scatter the dust that lines the street
where blank windows stare at the gray.
A fragment of newspaper rolls by, revealing and hiding
its jumble of pain under clouds the colour of bruises.
And the torn creation seems to live in the lines
of the face of this solitary woman,
old coat buttoned high and frayed hat pulled hard
on a forehead furrowed with years,
eyelids pinched from the chill of the air
as she shifts, from one hand to the other,
the heavy weight of two bags that might
carry all that she cares about today.
See how carefully she opens her thin wallet
at the counter of the McDonald’s.
How each coin is cradled like a departing child
by wrinkled and shaking fingers.
How, when she lifts her face to yours and you
smile, and she smiles in return of your greeting
something crosses the space between you
like a bridge spanning unseen waters
and across that bridge moves a gentle light,
a glow of kindness, of friendship, of grace.
Is that you in those eyes, O Beloved Redeemer,
in that smile, in that bridge, in that light?
Is that you in the lines on all our weathered faces,
in all our hands that count out life’s coins?
Grant me grace to see you looking back at me
with the love you have for all creation,
to see you, O King, in all of your glory,
beneath the folds of each old hat, worn coat.
Thanks ….. Andrew King
Postscript.
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
Lingering in Happiness
by Mary Oliver,
After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground
where it will disappear–but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole’s tunnel;
and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.
After the confession.
by Pádraig Ó Tuama
After the confession
he looked relieved
and also anxious to leave.
I am no one’s priest
but I know that
such telling leave
small exhaustions
in their wake.
He told me, a week later,
god, I slept soundly
that night.
and I believed him.
Is confession given, taken,
or done?
Perhaps it’s shared.
It bears witness to words
that can’t be eaten
by one.
Today
Mary Oliver
Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the gardening rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
From Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems (New York: Penguin, 2012).
Miracle
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in —
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those who had known him all along.
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Born in Northern Ireland, he was the oldest of nine children. Until his teenage years Heaney lived on his small family farm. Later, he lived in Belfast (1957–1972), and then taught at Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford.
This poem considers the healing of the paralytic in Mark 2 from the perspective of the friends. It’s taken from his book Human Chain (2010), poems that Heaney wrote after he suffered a stroke in 2005 and that concentrate on suffering and mortality.
The Suitor
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
–Jane Kenyon.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
— David Wagoner (1999)
Comment by Pádraig Ó Tuama
The truth of this poem is an old truth. There are the places you wish to go, there are the places you desperately wish you never left, there are the places you imagine you should be, and there is the place called here. In the world of Wagoner’s poem, it is the rooted things – trees and bushes – that tell the truth to the person who is lost, the person with legs and fear who wishes to be elsewhere. The person must stand still, feel their body still on the ground where they are, in order to learn the wisdom. This is not easy wisdom, it is frightening wisdom. In Irish, there is a phrase ar eagla na heagla that translates as “fear of fear”. It is true that there are some things we fear, but that there is, even deeper, a fear of fear. So we are prevented from being here not only by being frightened of certain places, but by the fear of being frightened of certain places. So “Stand still” the poet advises. Learn from the things that are already in the place where you wish you were not.
Hello to the fear of fear.
Hello to here.
Taken from “In the Shelter. Finding Home in the World.”
by Pádraig Ó Tuama 2015.
Loaves and Fishes
BY DAVID WHYTE
This is not
the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.
From The House of Belonging: poems by David Whyte
It Takes Time.
Noel Davis from “Heart Gone Walkabout”
It takes time to bake a loaf of bread,
to grind, to knead, to wait….
Time for friends to break and share their lives.
It takes time to craft in wood,
to strip, to wound, to bleed….
Time for the original to be released from the prison of our fear.
It takes time for us to build
and fortify our lives,
Time for the steal of the Divine to slay our pride.
It takes time to be with pain,
to yield and let the healing have its way,
Time in the darkness to trust the dawn.
It takes time to be alone
to become one’s intimate friend,
Time in the dry for the hidden stream to fill the empty well.
It takes time to wait in silence
for the coming of the spring.
Time for the bud to swell on winter’s dreams.
It takes time to let your life be turned around,
to accept a vision’s death,
Time in the void to see with different eyes.
It takes time to still within
and merge with life,
Time in the wild to let a river slow you down.
It takes time to tend a crop of grain,
to plough, to sow, to wonder….
Time for love to ripen and be harvested.