unask

 

 

rose-blue

 

Sweet procession, rose-blue,
and all them bells.

Bandstand red, the eyes
at treetop level seeing it. 'Are we
what we think we are or are we
what befalls us?'

The people from an open window
the eyes
seeing it! Daytime! Or twilight!

Sweet procession, rose-blue.
If we're here let's be here now.

And the train whistle? Who
invented that? Lonesome man, wanted the trains
to speak for him.

 

Denise Levertov, Seems like we must be somewhere else

 

 

 

 

 

my sweet, crushed angel

 

You didn't dance so badly, my dear, my love:
Not easy to keep the beat with Beauty itself.

You moved like an angel,
My sweet, crushed angel,
Getting that near to God.

Hard to follow, those moves of His,
Are they not, sweetheart, my heart?
And His musicians, well: how many can hear them at all?

OK, so the music has stopped
For a while;
So, tonight, it costs just too much
to get down with God.

But Hafiz knows the way God works.
Have patience, angel, He will feel your desire,
And there He will be
For you.

You didn't dance so badly, my dear, my heart:
Not easy, you know, to embrace the Unbearable.

You moved like an angel,
O my sweet,
My sweet crushed angel.

Hafiz, transl. Tom Davis

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

scamel

there is a new entry in our scamel blog.

 

 

 

skies

 

We never know how high we are
Till we are asked to rise
And then if we are true to plan
Our statures touch the skies --

The Heroism we recite
Would be a normal thing
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King

 

Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

thinking

 

Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
talking of consonants, elision,
caught in the how, oblivious of why:
I look in your face, Jude,
neither frowning nor nodding,
opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:
a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking:
What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.

 

Adrienne Rich, In a classroom

 

 

 

pier

 

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dreams drying.

 

Denise Levertov, Losing track

 

 

 

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