"The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses."

Hanna Rion

"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be."

Anna Louise Strong

"God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars."

Martin Luther

"It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you."

Nigel Slater

"In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, for in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed."

Kahlil Gibran

To Live in the Mercy of God

To live in the mercy of God. The complete

sentence too adequate, has no give.

Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

stony wood beneath lenient

moss bed.

And awe suddenly

passing beyond itself. Becomes

a form of comfort.

Becomes the steady

air you glide on, arms

stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

To hear the multiple silence

of trees, the rainy

forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,

as salt water

would hold you,

once you dared.

Denise Levertov

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

Albert Camus

The past is beautiful
Like the darkness between the fireflies

Mason Jennings

"The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things...the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard."

Barbara Pym

She's So Innocent

If she was a flower
she would be a Tiger Lily.

If the air and grass were not a stage for her
then her heart would have a window.

If you could distinguish between the devil and angel
in the movements of her eyebrows,

or whether or not she twists her foot so slowly
unintentionally,

then there would be no more
fun in uncertainty, no more risk in temptation.

If she was a note, then
she would slowly bend up a whole step

in a minor key, softly sustain it,
and fall, as in a gravity of sound

as strong as the pull of the twist
of the arch of her foot.

If she was a simile,
she would be a dress.

Nick A.

"True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness."

Friedrich Nietzsche

elaborate signings

"women are the sweetness of life.”

poets can build galaxies from pebbles
& breathe the word of life into brief glances,
but one must be careful with the power of creation
so i scribble an obligatory, struggling to keep from
staining the page with the exaggeration of new passion,
unsure if i am simply the writer who lives downstairs,
plays his coltrane too loud & likes thunderstorms

i take a trip one flight up
where your eyes escort me to another country,
your touch becomes a wet kiss on the horizon
of a birthday in a warm july
i travel to your smile to hear stories of
wrecked trains parked in your dining room

but the past is a vulgar thief
it steals the laughter from your eyes,
tosses the broken edges of yesterday’s heartache
into this remembrance
i dream of erasing painful memories with lingering
caresses from a steady hand

i rearrange the jagged stars of your past
i am the young boy smiling at you with love letter eyes
i carve your name into the soul of graying trees
i am your first slow dance, a trembling hand teetering on your waist
i replace the melancholy prayers on your lips with urgent kisses
i swear an oath to your beauty, become holy in your embrace

traveling tall miles through years of distance, i arrive, wet from your tears,
my only tool—a poet’s skill
i mend your smile,
emancipate your eyes,
& together
we ride that wrecked train from your dining room
to the horizon of your birthday in another country.

Kenneth Carroll

"In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

Willa Cather

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell -
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Rabindranath Tagore

The Summer Day

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver