Thank you for writing "in which I attempt the impossibility of articulating the language of my cells." That essay moved me deeply; it's profound and brilliant and important, and it helped get me through the past couple weeks.
Wow, thank you. This is really intense, condensing so much human experience that’s often unseen and unheard. I like to think this kind of poem creates more awareness and compassion, underlining our shared humanity.
Mary Oliver writes so beautifully about grief; I think you could probably pick most of her poems (Heavy is a favorite) for a similar effect. But one of my favorites is an excerpt from In Blackwater Woods:
Every word Siken writes is entirely perfect -- he has two small volumes of poetry out, and a new more lyrical prose book coming out next year, finally!!! (He had a stroke a few years ago and it derailed the publication of another book of poems that was supposed to come out a couple of years ago.)
Accidental poetry: I have to read a lot of obits for a particular part of my job, and I recently came across a stranger's condolence note to the family of another stranger on one of those "tribute pages." She had written: "I was so shocked by this loss. My deepest symphony." And I thought, 'Never has a typo been so perfect.'
To everyone grieving, all the time, which is all of us: My deepest symphony.
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.
Love you, thank you, mama. ❤️❤️❤️❤️
🙏🙏❤️❤️
Wendell Berry is also who my own mom looked to for inspiration. Thank you, Wendy.
Love you, April.
Love you too, Wendy.
💚💚💚
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.
Thank you. ❤️🙏
Tortures
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.
Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.
Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.
Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.
Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.
— Wislawa Szymborska
(trans. Joanna Trzeciak)
This one.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thank you for writing "in which I attempt the impossibility of articulating the language of my cells." That essay moved me deeply; it's profound and brilliant and important, and it helped get me through the past couple weeks.
I’m so glad to know it was helpful. Thank you. And ❤️.
Home Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
One of the best. Yes. Thank you.
Wow, thank you. This is really intense, condensing so much human experience that’s often unseen and unheard. I like to think this kind of poem creates more awareness and compassion, underlining our shared humanity.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
-- David Wagoner
This is so beautiful. Thank you, Mary.
lighthouse by Nayyirah Waheed
i am your friend.
a soul for your soul.
a place for your life.
home.
know this.
sun or water.
here
or
away.
we are a lighthouse.
we leave.
and
we stay.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
The Low Road by Marge Piercy
What can they do to you?
Whatever they want..
They can set you up, bust you,
they can break your fingers,
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember.
they can take away your children,
wall up your lover;
they can do anything you can’t stop them doing.
How can you stop them?
Alone you can fight, you can refuse.
You can take whatever revenge you can
But they roll right over you.
But two people fighting back to back
can cut through a mob
a snake-dancing fire
can break a cordon,
termites can bring down a mansion
Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.
Thirteen makes a circle,
a hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity
and your own newsletter;
ten thousand community
and your own papers;
a hundred thousand,
a network of communities;
a million our own world.
It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say WE
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.
one of my favorites. thank you.
Mary Oliver writes so beautifully about grief; I think you could probably pick most of her poems (Heavy is a favorite) for a similar effect. But one of my favorites is an excerpt from In Blackwater Woods:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
❤️ love her so much, yes. ❤️
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
T. S. Eliot, East Coker
Beautiful 🙏 Thank you.
Say Yes, by Andrea Gibson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=untGVUfVGdo
It starts:
"When two violins are placed in a room, if a chord on one violin is struck
the other violin will sound the note
If this is your definition of hope
This is for you
The ones who know how powerful we are
Who know we can sound the music in the people around us
simply by playing our own strings
for the ones who sing life into broken wings
open their chests and offer their breath
as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving
Spare those intent on proving god is dead..."
Ooof. 💔❤️🩹
Detail of the Woods
by Richard Siken
I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Your body told me in a dream it's never been afraid of anything.
This is so beautiful, thank you.
Every word Siken writes is entirely perfect -- he has two small volumes of poetry out, and a new more lyrical prose book coming out next year, finally!!! (He had a stroke a few years ago and it derailed the publication of another book of poems that was supposed to come out a couple of years ago.)
Crush is extraordinary; it's also that rare thing: a truly original voice. To my ear, those poems don't sound at all like anyone else.
just ordered it. thank you.
Yes, that. 'Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out' might be my favorite written thing, period.
Accidental poetry: I have to read a lot of obits for a particular part of my job, and I recently came across a stranger's condolence note to the family of another stranger on one of those "tribute pages." She had written: "I was so shocked by this loss. My deepest symphony." And I thought, 'Never has a typo been so perfect.'
To everyone grieving, all the time, which is all of us: My deepest symphony.
Holy shit. This is perfect.
Great As You Are
Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ears. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.
(Susan Griffin, Bending Home)
Oooof. Thank you, Sonya.
I needed these words — thank you so much for sharing. I'll leave one of mine to keep the thread going. I hope it helps someone, somewhere: https://open.substack.com/pub/roxsar/p/chrysalis?r=3a36f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That was so beautiful, thank you Roxanna.
"... that's how you get a butterfly
a caterpillar eats herself
before the world does."
Yes. My heart. Love you.
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
World on Fire, Sarah McLachlan
Hearts are worn in these dark ages
You’re not alone in these stories pages
The light has fallen amongst the living and the dying
And I’ll try to hold it in, yeah, I’ll try to hold it in
The world is on fire
It’s more than I can handle
I’ll tap into the water
Try and bring my share
Try to bring more
More than I can handle
Bring it to the table
Bring what I am able
I watch the Heavens but I find no calling
Something I can do to change what’s coming
Stay close to me while the sky is falling
I don’t wanna be left alone, don’t want to be alone
The world is on fire
It’s more than I can handle
I’ll tap into the water
Try and bring my share
Try to bring more
More than I can handle
Bring it to the table
Bring what I am able
Hearts break, hearts mend, love still hurts
Visions clash, planes crash
Still there’s talk of saving souls
Still the cold is closing in on us
We part the veil on our killer sun
Stray from the straight line on this short run
The more we take the less we become
The fortune of one man means less for some
The world is on fire
It’s more than I can handle
I’ll tap into the water
Try and bring my share
Try to bring more
More than I can handle
Bring it to the table
Bring what I am able
The world is on fire
It’s more than I can handle
I’ll tap into the water
Try and bring my share
Try to bring more
More than I can handle
Bring it to the table
Bring what I am able
❤️❤️❤️