unask

 

morning rain

The dawn light. A light rain.
I hear it on the treetop leaves.
Then, the mist. The morning wind
blows it and the clouds away.

Now colours deepen, and a sense of grace:
the presence of water.
And then, across the landscape
the smell of morning rain.

Du Fu (712-770 AD) tr. Tom Davis

 

 

dust of snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Robert Frost

 

 

upside down

The waters deep, the waters dark,
Reflect the seekers, hide the sought,
Whether in water or in air to drown.
Between them curls the silver spark,
Barbed, baited, waiting, of a thought--
Which in the world is upside down,
The fish hook or the question mark?

Howard Nemerov

 

 

that sweet maiden

In your body, bliss.
As grass, from dewfall
drinks in its own green,
so it was inside you
mother of joy.

Now her bliss burns in all of us
it sings us, in unison,
out of that sweet maiden
Mary, praise her, she gave birth to God.

Viscera tua gaudium habuerunt,
sicut gramen, super quod ros cadit,
cum ei viriditatem infudit,
ut et in te factum est,
o Mater omnis gaudii.

Nunc omnis Ecclesia in gaudio rutilet
ac in symphonia sonet
propter dulcissima Virginem
et laudabilem Mariam, dei Genitricem.

Hildegard of Bingen (transl. Tom Davis)

 

 

daisies and bruises

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Anne Sexton

 

 

finding again the world

Across the millstream below the bridge
Seven blue swallows divide the air
In shapes invisible and evanescent,
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s
Or memory’s power to keep them there.

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Howard Nemerov

 

 

gazing down at the sea

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wallace Stevens