Singularity

Singularity
by Marie Howe

   (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is
 
All   everything   home

Where I'm From

 The Where I'm From poem project started with George Ella Lyon, who wrote this stunning piece. Now, it is used in classrooms across the country help young poets express themselves. I used the form to create my own version. This is where I'm from.

Where I'm From

I am from a paper grocery bag of dried mint leaves,
from church bulletins hot from the copier,
and a washed evening kitchen.
I am from the suburban bilevel set
into the Pennsylvania hillside.
I am from the canna lilies,
the fiddlehead ferns who unfurled beside me.

I'm from ice cream sundaes for dinner sometimes
and mountains of peas to be shelled.
I am from Warren and Richard and Jeffery,
from Verna and Anna and Maietta.
I'm from church three times a week,
from the kitchen classroom and the lily ponds.

I'm from bless this food to our bodies
and don't slam the door,
from the keys jingling it's time to go.
I'm from takeout pizza and adventures in the stars.

I am from Neversink Mountain and the Schuylkill River,
chicken pot pie and potato filling,
from four black Bibles and a pair of handcuffs.

On our wall was a portrait of two great horned owls,
always silent and watching.
I am from them too,
waiting in the forest,
guarding this house,
calling this land my own. 

 cls
Fall 2019 

The Low Road

The Low Road
by Marge Piercy 

 
What can they do 

to you? Whatever they want. 

They can set you up, they can 

bust you, they can break 

your fingers, they can 

burn your brain with electricity, 

blur you with drugs till you 

can’t walk, can’t remember, they can 

take your child, wall up 

your lover. They can do anything 

you can’t stop them 

from doing. How can you stop 

them? Alone, you can fight, 

you can refuse, you can 

take what revenge you can 

but they roll over you. 

But two people fighting 

back to back can cut through 

a mob, a snake-dancing file 

can break a cordon, an army 

can meet an army. 

Two people can keep each other 

sane, can give support, conviction, 

love, massage, hope, sex. 

Three people are a delegation, 

a committee, a wedge. With four 

you can play bridge and start 

an organization. With six 

you can rent a whole house, 

eat pie for dinner with no 

seconds, and hold a fund-raising party. 

A dozen make a demonstration. 

A hundred fill a hall. 

A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; 

ten thousand, power and your own paper; 

a hundred thousand, your own media; 

ten million, your own country. 

 It goes on one at a time, 

it starts when you care 

to act, it starts when you do 

it again after they said no, 

it starts when you say We 

and know who you mean, and each 

day you mean one more.

Call It Dreaming [One Year]

On this day one year ago, I started writing and posting poetry again after eight years. I have been no victim of tragedy; I think I just... fell asleep. To the one who woke me up, I love you. Life is brutal and beautiful and its story deserves to be told by all of us.

Call It Dreaming
by Sam Beam

Say it's here where our pieces fall in place
Any rain softly kisses us on the face
Any wind means we're running
We can sleep and see 'em coming
Where we drift and call it dreaming
We can weep and call it singing

Where we break when our hearts are strong enough
We can bow 'cause our music's warmer than blood
Where we see enough to follow
We can hear when we are hollow
Where we keep the light we're given
We can lose and call it living

Where the sun isn't only sinking fast
Every night knows how long it's supposed to last
Where the time of our lives is all we have
And we get a chance to say, before we ease away
For all the love you've left behind
You can have mine

Say it's here where our pieces fall in place
We can fear 'cause the feeling's fine to betray
Where our water isn't hidden
We can burn and be forgiven
Where our hands hurt from healing
We can laugh without a reason

'Cause the sun isn't only sinking fast
Every moon and our bodies make shining glass
Where the time of our lives is all we have
And we get a chance to say, before we ease away
For all the love you've left behind
You can have mine

Remember

In honor of Joy Harjo, newly named the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate.

Remember

by Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star's stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother's, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people are you.

Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember.

The Tree

5.23.19
cls

Little Miracle

Little Miracle

by Molly Peacock

No use getting hysterical.

The important part is: we’re here.

Our lives are a little miracle.

My hummingbird-hearted schedule

beats its shiny frenzy, day into year.

No use getting hysterical—

it’s always like that. The oracle

a human voice could be is shrunk by fear.

Our lives are a little miracle

—we must remind ourselves—whimsical,

and lyrical, large and slow and clear.

(So no use getting hysterical!)

All words other than I love you are clerical,

dispensable, and replaceable, my dear.

Our inner lives are a miracle.

They beat their essence in the coracle

our ribs provide, the watertight boat we steer

through others’ acid, hysterical

demands. Ours is the miracle: we’re here.

Excerpt from "Little Gidding"

Excerpt from "Little Gidding," Part I
by T.S. Eliot

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

The art of blessing the day

The art of blessing the day
by Marge Piercy

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin; wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

How It Felt

How It Felt

If a wound in the spirit
showed up like a gash in the body,
I would have bled all over the carpet
every morning, faint with loss
and regret in every ragged breath
you never knew.
Someone call the doctor.
Someone call you.

1.30.19
cls

I Dream a World

For MLK Day, a poem that may have inspired I Have a Dream...

I Dream a World

by Langston Hughes

I dream a world where man

No other man will scorn,

Where love will bless the earth

And peace its paths adorn

I dream a world where all

Will know sweet freedom’s way,

Where greed no longer saps the soul

Nor avarice blights our day.

A world I dream where black or white,

Whatever race you be,

Will share the bounties of the earth

And every man is free,

Where wretchedness will hang its head

And joy, like a pearl,

Attends the needs of all mankind-

Of such I dream, my world!

Mary

For several years, I have thought about writing a letter to Mary Oliver, my favorite poet, to thank her for enriching my life. I'm sure she has received thousands, being a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, but I felt it would be a symbolic gesture at least, and I would be contented in the fact that I had expressed my gratitude. But I kept putting it off, and what I knew would happen happened today: she passed away, age 83.

So I will try to tell you a little of it, in few words, for one of Mary's great skills was her economy with language.

She taught me how to be vulnerable, how to make allowance for weakness, how to let myself feel. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

She showed me that the sacred is all around us. You cannot cross one hummock or furrow but it is His holy ground.

Mindfulness? She wrote the book. She wrote dozens. Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

She said, whoever you are, whatever you're doing, be in love. When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Peace to you, Mary. You have brought, and helped me to see, such beauty.

The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

When Giving Is All We Have

When Giving Is All We Have

by Alberto Rios

One river gives

Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

Now Is the Time

Now Is the Time

by Hafiz

Now is the time to know

That all you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider

A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child's training wheels

To be laid aside

When you can finally live

With veracity

And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy

Whom the Beloved

Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,

Why do you still

Throw sticks at your heart

And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside

That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know

That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time 

For you to deeply compute the impossibility

That there is anything

But Grace.

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

Aging

Aging
by Rosmarie Waldrop

Aging. Being in pain. Finishing. Rotting.
             —Emmanuel Fournier

We feel we’ve contracted into very dim, very old white dwarf stars, not yet black holes. Wrinkled, but not quite withered. Dropped out of summer like a stone, we watch time fall. With the leaves. Into a deeper color. Wavelengths missing in the reflected light.

The road toward rotting has been so long. We forget where we are going. Like a child, I look amazed at a thistle. Or drink cheap wine and hug my knees. To shorten the shadow? To ward off letting go?

So much body now, to be cared for. What with the arrow, lost cartilage, skeleton within. Memory no longer holds up. A bridge to theory and dreams. Impervious to vertigo. Days are long and too spacious.

Though the sun is a mere eight light-minutes away elderly dust hangs. Over the long sentences I wrote in the last century. Now thoughts in purpose tremor, in lament, in search of. Not being too soon? Going to be? Unconformities separating strata of decay?

You say aimlessness has its virtues. Just as not fully understanding may be required for harmony. And blow your nose. You sing fast falls the eventide, damp on the skin, with bitter wind. And here it is again, the craving for happiness that night induces. Or the day of marriage.

The difference of our bodies makes for different velocities. But gravity is always attracting, and my higher speed. Cannot outrun the inner fright we seem made of. Though I gesticulate broadly. As in a silent movie. Running after the train, waving goodbye.

Distant galaxies are moving away from us. Friends, lovers, family. Even the sky shifts toward red. Where every clearness is only. A more welcoming slope of the night. And I don’t remember why I opened the door.

Mouth full of moans, you believe the natural state. Is a body at rest. And close your eyes to the threat of your face disappearing. Without thought or emotion. Into its condition. And I thought I knew you.

Are the complications thinning to a final simplicity? The nearest thing to a straight path in curved space? Clouds of gas slowly collapsing? With only one possible outcome? But unlike a black hole I keep my hair on. As I move toward the unquestionable dark.

This dark, Mrs. Ramsay thinks, is perhaps the core of every self. The deep note of existence the ear finds, but cannot hold on to. Across the vicissities of the symphony. Or else this dark could be our shelter in the time of long dominion. And though we are not well suited to the perspectives it opens it is an awesome thing to see. Once you can see it.

Heavy Summer Rain

Heavy Summer Rain

by Jane Kenyon

The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.

I Keep Looking

I Keep Looking

I keep looking

for the letter

that tells me

you love me.

It doesn't exist yet.

10.26.18

cls

The World Seems

"To give a blessing is to affirm, to say 'yes' to a person's Belovedness. A blessing touches the original goodness of the other and calls forth his or her Belovedness." --Henri Nouwen

The World Seems

by Gregory Orr

The world seems so palpable
And dense: people and things
And the landscapes
They inhabit or move through.

Words, on the other hand,
Are so abstract--they're
Made of empty air
Or black scratches on a page
That urge us to utter
Certain sounds.
                      And us:
Poised in the middle, aware
Of the objects out there
Waiting patiently to be named,
As if the right words
Could save them.
                      And don't
They deserve it?
So much hidden inside each one,
Such a longing
To become the beloved.

And inside us: the sounds
That could extend that blessing--
How they crowd our mouths,
How they press up against
Our lips, which are such
A narrow exit for a joy so desperate.

Farm Wife

Farm Wife

by R.S. Thomas

Hers is the clean apron, good for fire

Or lamp to embroider, as we talk slowly

In the long kitchen, while the white dough

Turns to pastry in the great oven,

Sweetly and surely as hay making

In a June meadow, hers are the hands,

Humble with milking, but still now

In her wide lap as though they heard

A quiet music, hers being the voice

That coaxes time back to the shadows

In the room's corners, O, hers is all

This strong body, the safe island

Where men may come, sons and lovers,

Daring the cold seas of her eyes.

Are You Going to Stay?

Are You Going to Stay?

by Thomas Meyer

What was it I was going to say?

Slipped away probably because

it needn’t be said. At that edge

almost not knowing but second

guessing the gain, loss, or effect

of an otherwise hesitant remark.

Slant of light on a brass box. The way

a passing thought knots the heart.

There’s nothing, nothing to say.