The Hare that Speaks...

I look out of the window, the leaves
are cold and still as they lay on the ground
and there, in the middle my view,
is something that blends in
with its surrounding yet does not
at the same time. I walk out
to that place and am awakened
by the corpse of a hare.

Death surrounds my feet as I kneel down
to inspect my fellow creature: there is
no blood, no breath, no sign of life,
and there is no head.
All that remains is the body,
a bruised memory of a life once lived
that is now returning what was given to it.

This creature will not rise like the phoenix,
to soar over the ashes of what it had made
burning a new image into the gray, cloudless sky.
Rather the hare with no head
will lie here and speak to me.
It will tell me the reality of life,
and tell me to return home
quickly.

"i thank You God..."

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
- E.E. Cummings

This Little Babe...

This little Babe so few days old is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise the gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field, his naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries, his arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need and feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall, his bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystacks his stakes; of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound, the angels’ trump alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight, stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward, this little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.
- Robert Southwell

A Christmas Hymn...

A stable lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine…
- Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943-2004

The Fall of the Trees...

The harsh dark
tones and edges
of the bark
cover hidden
life.

That which
from its roots
extends growth
of one
through time.

Perhaps, this
is hell:
wrapped in death,
lifeless without
a source other
than self,

Standing alone
in the cold
as all that we
cling to falls
away,
lying around us,
yet, we cannot
hold them again.

On a Smile...

There something
beyond
the face,
lips,skin and teeth,
that conveys
meaning.
A warmth
that is like
little messengers
of folded paper,
kites that
are blown
by your soul
into the sky
of my consciousness,
that awaken
the joy of
my wind
and stir a
blue calm
into the collage
of living.

More...

The taste of anticipation’s
longing for the fullness
of completion
is what you bring.

Allowing the mystery
to have its plot revealed
and my place
to surprise me.

Real as the
emotion that swells
and tries to protrude
from the skin and hair
on the small of the back.

That pregnant savoring
is what you pour into
the worn chalice
smoothly, slowly, steadily,
as I cry “More”.

All Our Knowledge...

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
- T.S. Eliot, Opening Stanza of T. S. Eliot's Choruses from the Rock

If You Forget Me...

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine
- Pablo Neruda, If You Forget Me,

Night...

My love is
like the night.
A harsh dark
that emerges to complete
the other half of time.
There it lives
quietly, firmly,
exposed
to the earth.

Your love comes to me
like the stars,
awe-inspiring and radiant,
and you lay your body
over mine blanketing us
into one shining life;
bringing beauty to
me, bringing
eternity to us.

Tell All the Truth But Tell it Slant...

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
- Emily Dickinson

The Salmon Run

The salmon run
and I am ashamed.
Determination
is an evidence, a frustration
of life, of love
as the pulse of time’s
pace, abrupt pace,
pounds one’s face.
A face that is not bold in
the shimmer of the sun’s rays
that dance beautifully on the
romantic red and green
that surround, that furiously,
passionately seek an end,
an ecstasy of finale.
Dark is the shadow that walks coldly
over the forcefully shut eyes
and trembling lips of the nonbearing
one, as he tries to leave the bank
and emerge. To leave as someone else
without the blooded work
that is lived in long stretches of
warm water and rounded stones.
Escaping as the undetermined
and the unnatural.
The salmon run
and I am ashamed.

We Are Like Browning's Last Duchess...

A few lines from Browning's My Last Duchess mirrors our sinful nature and acts as a symbol of the spiritual, desirous search that we put in everything that develops into apathy, sloth, depression and acedia and attempts to cause us to be devoid of the longing for The More that is God, Himself.

Let these lines from My Last Duchess and see if you can relate to her empty, desirous search.

"She had / A heart – how shall I say – too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."

The Cry of the Sufferer...

A child cries
in the midnight;
a mother rocks
as the father sits
helplessly listening.

Sound holds within itself
no truth,
but the father hears
truth
echoing with cadence and rhythm.

The overwhelming tones
turn to soft wimpers
of a reality that the listener
and the speaker both
know as true.

Suffering speaks,
not the sound.
The voice is a call to
someone else, one who also knows
the cry of the sufferer.

Woman...

Her hair
is like golden fields of wheat
on a day when the wind stirs
and moves the grain
in a joyful dance.

This is love,
but it is not what I love.

Her humanity
is so real and true,
more than one could ever imagine
of another, bringing me into the person
that I am truly to be.

This is what I love:
not what I see or feel,
but what makes me alive;
what is so real that it is
what makes me love.

"Laugh..."

Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
- Wendell Berry, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book, 1970

Hummingbird...

My throat is red
with a furious thirst,
a share in the
beautiful plague
of being created.

Every moment
is a fleeting one.
Every flash of color
a distraction.
Every thought bent
on satisfaction.

I am small in this world,
a wonder, a pet,
an animal,
caught captive by the very substance
that gives me life.

The Peace of Wild Things...

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
- Wendell Berry

The River...

I remember the smell
of the river,
pure and new,
as it turned and moved
down and around the mountain bend.

I want that river again.
I want that baptismal smell,
pure and new,
as the water turns and moves
down and around the twisted body.

As a child I lay floating
like a leaf upon the steady pulse
of the river's current.
It moved beneath me.

As a man I lay awake
at night with the darkness surrounding.
The crickets remind me of the beating of time,
as the river moves,
pure and new,
within me.

"Because in Him..."

"Because in Him the Flesh is united
to the Word without magical transformation,
Imagination is redeemed from promicuous
formation with her own images...

Because in Him the Word is united
to the Flesh without loss of perfection.
Reason is redeemed from incestuous
fixation of her own Logic..."
- W.H. Auden, "The Mediation of Simeon" in Collected Longer Poems (London: Faber&Faber, 1977 ed.), pp.182ff.

"All Things Here are Vexing Vanitee..."

"Learn what deceitful Toyes, and empty things,
This World, and all its best Enjoyments bee:
Out of the Earth no true Contentment springs,
But all things here are vexing Vanitee."

- Michael Wigglesworth, Vanity of Vanities