unask

 

purple

 

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.
Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk.

 

From Marge Piercy, Colors passing through us

 

 

into the throat of the flower

 

Looking into the vase, into the calyx, into the water drop,
Looking into the throat of the flower, at the pollen stain,
I can see the ambush love sprung once in the summery wood.

 

From James Fenton, Yellow tulips

 

 

smiling

 

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"

 

From George Herbert, Love bade me welcome

 

 

 

scamel

there is a new entry in our scamel blog.

 

 

 

a crack in everything

 

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

 

From Leonard Cohen, Anthem.

 

 

 

 

kindness

 

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God?

To fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain.

 

From Robinson Jeffers, The excesses of God

 

 

sound as a bench

 

The Rav
of Northern White Russia declined,
in his youth, to learn the
language of birds, because
the extraneous did not interest him; nevertheless
when he grew old it was found
he understood them anyway, having
listened well, and as it is said, 'prayed
with the bench and the floor.'

He used
what was at hand--as did
Angel Jones of Mold, whose meditations
were sewn into coats and britches.

Well, I would like to make,
thinking some line still taut between me and them,
poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air.

 

Denise Levertov

 

 

When, in the white sickroom

 

When, in the white sickroom in the Charité,
I woke up, towards morning,
I heard a blackbird. Then, I knew:
It's better. Already for quite a while
I had no more of the death fear, since, for sure, nothing
Is missing, just as long as
I am missing from myself.

Now, I have made it: I can take joy
In all the blackbird songs. Those after me as well.

 

Als ich in weissem Krankenzimmer der Charité
Aufwachte gegen Morgen zu
Und eine Amsel hörte, wusste ich
Es ist besser. Schon seit geraumer Zeit
Hatte ich keine Todesfurcht mehr, da ja nichts
Mir fehlen kann, vorausgesetzt
Ich selber fehle. Jetzt gelang es mir, mich zu freuen
Alles Amselgesanges nach mir auch.

 

Bertold Brecht (transl. Tom Davis)