Take a Poem, Leave a Poem
(never let go of the thread)
One of my favorite poems is called The Way It Is by William Stafford. I first heard it from my great Aunt Dot who recited it to me years ago. (When I read this poem to myself I imagine it in her voice every time.)
The Way It Is
By William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die: and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
In my last post I mentioned in passing that I just wanted to hear from poets right now and then, in the comments, you left poems. They were these. (Thank you.)
Friday morning, my substack app pinged me a stack from Patti Smith which also talked of poets. (ED: I didn’t realize that Lou Reed also died on the 27th of October nor did I realize that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath were both born then.)
It felt like kismet, which is why I am following Thursday’s post with this one, as an open invitation for all readers (including free subscribers this time) to post poetry that feels particularly resonant right now. Whether on a personal level or on a global one. I would also love it if you shared a song. Or a prayer for peace. Humanity. All of the things that feel particularly distant at the moment.
Thank you all in advance/here is Iggy Pop reciting Lou Reed’s poem “We are the People.”
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Spring
by Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her —
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.