I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I've been a dweller on the plains,
have sighed when summer days were gone;
No more I'll sigh; for winter here
Hath gladsome gardens of his own.

Dorothy Wordsworth

You Left Me

You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.

Emily Dickinson

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

Margaret Atwood

Now that no one looking

Now that no one looking at the night—
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can't and weren't meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.

Adam Kirsch

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

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church --
I keep it, staying at Home --
With a Bobolink for a Chorister --
And an Orchard, for a Dome --

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice --
I just wear my Wings --
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton -- sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman --
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at least --
I'm going, all along.

Emily Dickinson

Ebb & Flow

Amber skies stretch out across
mountains rich like indigo
Blackness bleeds to grey and light breaks
As dawn slowly lifts the shadows

A path once forgotten as I strayed
looking to follow those from before
Kicking up dust with their swollen shoes
Signs linger cross the earth strung cross the shore

Not as easy to look within and see with eyes
unblinded by life's rose colored lenses
To see the truth as bare as a rigid desert
Beyond the walls of brick , beyond chain linked fences

I will not view the world in black and white
as only coal dust in mouth or sweetness of new snow
I will see the reds, the golds, and the silver lining
Adjusting the tip of my soul to capture both ebb and flow

Delias Thompson

I Taught Myself To Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Zen and the Art of Saying Goodbye

I
She was so happy she could have cried,
she said. And he believed her.
He was taken by her honesty.
The room now felt as naked as they were, and new.

The radio alarm clock began its song perfectly.
Sinatra was signing "Fly Me to the Moon,"
And their laughter danced its way to the stars.
This morning the sunlight was not intrusive, but perfect.

II
But just as light breaks night falls,
and just as life wakes death calls.
Everything comes and goes.

There's a transitive nature to all things,
lovers, friends, ends beginnings.
Faith is a dog's nose.

"You fool," he said, but how could he be blamed to trust sincerity.
Words are words. Just words, just words.
They're glass they're masks, they're fire, they're swords

I know no other way to feel.
I tell you because I can.
Yet, I'm afraid to say I miss you.
You may not understand.

III
Still, in the darkest, most hidden corner of my soul
there is a hunger for the shadow that falls
between the soft curve of your back,
for the missing weight of your hand on my chest.

Nick A.

Speculation

If he had merely smiled,
she would certainly have smiled back.

Or if he had offered, say, an orange,
a pleasant waxy glove of color,
a burgeoning world of pith and pulp
plucked unexpectedly from its citrus orbit,
then too, with yes please, thank you,
she would have smiled back.

Or if it were a joke, a joke
which had just then occurred to him
as his eyes scanned the effect
of waning light stretched out before them,
even a joke he had known for years, perhaps
one his grandfather had told him
on just such a gathering autumn evening,
if he had merely offered a joke,
surely then her generosity
would have proved magnificent,
and her smile, magnanimous.

If he had but thought,
had not let that slight phrase slide across his lips into the space
that formed the gloaming distance
between their bodies,
she just might have smiled.

Emily P.

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

XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Mary Oliver

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