unask

 

sunflowers

 

COME to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .

No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet. . .
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses. . .
And the world was all playthings.

 

Carl Sandburg

 

 

 

 

an orchid chorusing

 

Slow-rolling beauty
without end or beginning
assures our immortality.
The way an orchid chorusing
her fragrance in waves
says no goodbye is possible
in this joyous voyage.

 

Al Young

 

 

 

 

the gap between

 

What do they do,
The singers, tale writers, dancers, painters,
Shapers, makers?

They go there with empty hands, into
The gap between.
They come back with things in their hands.

They go silent and come back with words, with tunes.
They go into confusion and come back with patterns.
They go limping and weeping, ugly and frightened,
And come back with the wings of a red wing hawk,
The eye of a mountain lion.

That is where they live,
Where they get their breath,
There, in the gap between,
The empty place

 

Ursula le Guin

 

 

 

 

in memory of W.B. Yeats

 

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

 

W.H. Auden

 

 

curves

 

Later someone
told me they had found out
the universe is a kind of strip that
twists around and joins itself, and I believe it,
sometimes I can feel it, the way we are
pouring slowly toward a curve and around it
through something dark and soft, and we are bound to
each other.

 

Sharon Olds

 

 

love

 

Tenebris:     So what does it feel like?
Angela:     What, when I'm with him?
Tenebris:     Yes.
Angela:     It feels like all the songs are true.
Tenebris:     Yes.
Angela:     It feels like Christmas morning. Snow outside, and the strange light, reflected from the snow, silently filling the house; and inside, wonder, abundance, joy.
Tenebris:     Yes.

 

From the play Strange Shadows, by Deirdre Burton and Tom Davis

 

 

our Buddha nature

 

A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand becoming, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature.

It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night, become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language.

 

Haiku: Eastern Culture, 1949, Volume One, p. 243.
Translations and commentary by Reginald H. Blyth