All Categories

Ode to Dirt

7/16/2023

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters -- the plants
and animals and human animals.
It's as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you're our democracy. When I understood
I had never honored you as a living
equal, I was ashamed of myself,
as if I had not recognized
a character who looked so different from me,
but now I can see us all, made of the
same basic materials --
cousins of that first exploding from nothing --
in our intricate equation together. O dirt,
help us find ways to serve your life,
you who have brought us forth, and fed us
and who at the end will take us in
and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.

By Sharon Olds

0 Comments

To Be of Use

4/9/2023

0 Comments

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

By Marge Piercy

From All We Can Save
Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
& Katharine K. Wilkinson

0 Comments

Anthropocene Pastoral

10/18/2022

1 Comment

In the beginning, the ending was beautiful.
Early spring everywhere, the trees furred
pink and white, lawns the sharp green
that meant new. The sky so blue it looked
manufactured. Robins. We'd heard
the cherry blossoms wouldn't blossom
this year, but what was one epic blooming
when even the desert was an explosion
of verbena? When bobcats slinked through
primroses. When coyotes slept deep in orange
poppies. One New Year's Day we woke
to daffodils, wisteria, onion grass wafting
through the open windows. Near the end,
we were eyeletted. We were cottoned.
We were sundressed and barefoot. At least
it's starting gentle, we said. An absurd comfort,
we knew, a placebo. But we were built like that.
Built to say at least. Built to reach for the heat
of skin on skin even when we were already hot,
built to love the purpling desert in the twilight,
built to marvel over the pink bursting dogwoods,
to hold tight to every pleasure even as we
rocked together toward the graying, even as
we held each other, warmth to warmth,
and say sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry while petals
sifted softly to the ground all around us.

By Catherine Pierce

1 Comment

The Mask of Evil

1/23/2022

0 Comments

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving.
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe.
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

by Bertolt Brecht
German Playwright
February 10, 1898 - August 14, 1956

0 Comments

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

9/11/2021

0 Comments

(To W.E.B DuBois)

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than
  the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above
   it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
   went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
   bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers.
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

(1920)

by Langston Huges
(1902 - 1967)

0 Comments

When I Am Among the Trees

6/13/2021

0 Comments

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey
locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the
pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me,
and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It's simple," they
say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to
be filled
with light, and to shine."

by Mary Oliver

0 Comments

On Time

3/20/2021

2 Comments

"Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."

___From Orlando: A Biography
by Virginia Woolf

2 Comments

Let It Go

12/16/2020

3 Comments

let it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neither - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love

ee cummings

(1904-1962 - Complete Poems)

3 Comments

Nothing Gold Can Stay

10/21/2020

2 Comments

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsidiaries to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost
1874-1963

2 Comments

From Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

3/14/2020

1 Comment

Spring

A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

1 Comment

<<Previous

Archives

Categories