poem: New Year's Resolution, by Philip Appleman

this is now my favorite new year's poem!


New Year's Resolution




Well, I did it again, bringing in

that infant Purity across the land,

welcoming Innocence with gin

in New York, waiting up

to help Chicago,

Denver, L.A., Fairbanks, Hon-

olulu--and now

the high school bands are alienating Dallas,

and girls in gold and tangerine

have lost all touch with Pasadena,

and young men with muscles and missing teeth

are dreaming of personal fouls,

and it's all beginning again, just like

those other Januaries in

instant reply.



But I've had enough

of turning to look back, the old

post-morteming of defeat:

people I loved but didn't touch,

friends I haven't seen for years,

strangers who smiled but didn't speak--failures,

failures. No,

I refuse to leave it at that, because

somewhere, off camera,

January is coming like Venus

up from the murk of December, re-

virginized, as innocent

of loss as any dawn. Resolved: this year

I'm going to break my losing streak,

I'm going to stay alert, reach out,

speak when not spoken to,

read the minds of people in the streets.

I'm going to practice every day,

stay in training, and be moderate

in all things.

All things but love.



~ Philip Appleman ~



(New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996)

poem: view with a grain of sand, by wislawa szymborska

this poem to me is about the nameless and the named, to quote another poet, leonard cohen. 

tom best had participants in a nightwalking workshop do an exercise of walking around and naming what we saw.

then we walked around and looked at patterns and gave them nonsense names. 

take the tree's point of view, or the rock's, or the grain of sand's. become the tree, the rock, the grain of sand. 

this poem reminds me of that. but i'm not so sure these "things" are as oblivious to us as we often are to them. our naming puts us in the map, not the territory.

how do we, how can we know a grain of sand doesn't feel itself seen and touched? it may not have a nervous system, but it may still have some form of consciousness. 

what if everything, all of existence, is conscious? 

View With a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is inverted, his haste is make believe,
his news inhuman.

i love this poem by joy harjo, a map to the next world

maps have become my territory, and i'm adding this poem to my map collection.

thank you, joy harjo, for writing this, and thank you, joe riley, for panhala.net.

poem: Straight Talk from Fox, by Mary Oliver

mary oliver shape-shifted into a fox, hung out for awhile, and then she shape-shifted back into human form and wrote this poem. enjoy!

here's the link (with great photo!) if it doesn't come through: http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Straight_Talk_From_Fox.html

poem: Can You Imagine? by Mary Oliver

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightening storms
or the watery dark of a summer's night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now - whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade - surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

~ Mary Oliver ~


(Long Life)

poem: Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman (excerpt)

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
and with the young, and with the mothers or families,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
and your very flesh shall be a great poem....


~ Walt Whitman ~

(from the Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition)

poem: An Improvisation for Angular Momentum, by A.R. Ammons

i love the analogy and awareness of awareness here, that segues into pondering about the passage from life into death. i especially love the idea of the death mother shepherding us through.


Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation's fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

~ A.R. Ammons ~(Poetry, 1994)

poem: invisible work, by alison luterman

this is a great mother's day poem. real, not sentimental. enjoy!

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.
There is no other art.

~ Alison Luterman ~


(The Largest Possible Life)

poem: From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee ~

(Rose)

poem: To Begin With, the Sweet Grass, by Mary Oliver

she knows! so beautiful, so wise...


To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
(excerpt)

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

~ Mary Oliver ~


(Evidence)

poem: My Mind Was a Mirror, by Ernest Hyde

this poem reminds me of a process we experience as we grow older. awakening.

My mind was a mirror:
It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
In youth my mind was just a mirror
In a rapidly flying car,
Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
Then in time
Great scratches were made on the mirror,
Letting the outside world come in,
And letting my inner self look out.
For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image —
And this is the silence of wisdom.

~ Ernest Hyde ~

(Spoon River Anthology)

poem: For the Unknown Self, by John O'Donohue

I am loving John O'Donohue's poems more with each one I come across. Could he be writing about the third chakra here?


For the Unknown Self

So much of what delights and troubles you
Happens on a surface
You take for ground.
Your mind thinks your life alone,
Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,
Yet it seems that a little below your heart
There houses in you an unknown self
Who prefers the patterns of the dark
And is not persuaded by the eye's affection
Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience
With all your unfolding expression,
Is never drawn to break into light
Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness
And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom
That will often see you enchanted by twilight
Without ever recognizing the falling night,
It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:
All you do and say and think is fostered
Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease
That is not ruffled by disappointment;
It presides in a deeper current of time
Free from the force of cause and sequence
That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,
Its dark light might quench your mind,
For it knows how your primeval heart
Sisters every cell of your life
To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,
Offering you only discrete glimpses
Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,
Magnetized by some resonance
That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night
As the poet who draws your dreams,
Creating for you many secret doors,
Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to wholesome ease.

~ John O'Donohue ~


(To Bless the Space Between Us)

poem: The Night House, by Billy Collins

The Night House

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass --
the grass of civics, the grass of money --
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
and leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
and opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
and roams from room to room in the dark,
darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,
talking to each other or themselves
even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body -- that house of voices --
sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called
before bending again to its labor.

~ Billy Collins ~

(Sailing Around the Room)

poem: Starlings in Winter, by Mary Oliver

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)

poem: Mind Wanting More, by Holly Hughes

Mind Wanting More

Only a beige slat of sun
above the horizon, like a shade pulled
not quite down. Otherwise,
clouds. Sea rippled here and
there. Birds reluctant to fly.
The mind wants a shaft of sun to
stir the grey porridge of clouds,
an osprey to stitch sea to sky
with its barred wings, some dramatic
music: a symphony, perhaps
a Chinese gong.

But the mind always
wants more than it has --
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses -- as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.

~ Holly Hughes ~
(American Zen A Gathering of Poets)

poem: This Love, by Katie Raver

my dear friend katie wrote this. i can feel the influence of the weekend spent at buescher state park in celebration of my birthday, and the influence of rumi, whom she read to us that weekend, and yet katie makes it completely her own, an original poem.


This love has made me crazy.
I keep forgetting to rise up, to worry,
and I’m dancing around in meadows,
silly and stupid with your ecstasy.

Where were all these meadows before?

Next to you in the car,
the discord of lights and smog
becomes Spring itself.
All of humanity is on the same path, at the same time,
red lights guiding the way.

I only bother to sleep to hold
your hand in those unconscious moments.
Butterflies and moths fly out of my eyes.
Two trees use me as their telephone line.
I try to tell the man watering red hibiscus plants.
He gives me a round stone.

How can I explain this insanity?
I just follow the owl flying overhead,
downtown, at midday. Your eyes glisten,
you hold me close. I’m late again
for another meeting.

poem: Any Chance Meeting, by Rumi

mahalo to katie for sharing this poem. (katie knows i spend time looking for the shine)


In every gathering, in any chance meeting
on the street, there is a shine,
an elegance rising up.

Today I recognized that that jewel-like beauty
is the presence, our loving confusion,
the glow in which watery clay
gets brighter than fire,
the one we call the Friend.

poem: In the Beginning, by David Whyte

mahalo to keith for sharing this, who knows of my return from exile.


Sometimes simplicity rises
like a blossom of fire
from the white silk of your own skin.
You were there in the beginning
you heard the story, you heard the merciless
and tender words telling you where you had to go.
Exile is never easy and the journey
itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
when you heard that voice, you had to go.
You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live
so close to the flame of that compassion.
You had to go out in the world and make it your own
so you could come back with
that flame in your voice, saying listen...
this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...
It is all here, it is all here.

poem: Rebus, by Jane Hirshfield

You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life -
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?


~ Jane Hirshfield ~

(Given Sugar, Given Salt)

(Rebus -- "A representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often presented as a puzzle.")

poem: Boundaries, by Lynn Ungar

The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?

You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless or ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?

Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?

~ Lynn Ungar ~

(Blessing the Bread)

as usual with poems from panhala, click the title to see it online, with a beautiful photo and music