The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers- by Mary Oliver

The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers

Who can guess the luna's sadness who lives so
briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone
longing to be ground down, to be part again of
something livelier? Who can imagine in what
heaviness the rivers remember their original
clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile
time with them. And I suggest them to you also,
that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life
be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as
you feel how it actually is, that we- so cleaver, and
ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained- are only
one design of the moving, the vivacious many.


by Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings, 2012

Three Times My Life Has Opened, by Jane Hirshfield

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and starts
      to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.
But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her leaves
       like a woman in love with winter, dropping the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light
       stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,
       or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

by Jane Hirshfield, from The Lives of the Heart, 1997

I Went Into The Maverick Bar, by Gary Snyder

Hello Poets,
Disguise, escape and connection. Gary Snyder stepping back into the timeless time, embracing our tough old stars and the real work that beckons beyond the bluff.
Best,
Sam

I Went Into The Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
                              backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
                                  by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
                                 where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
                                a couple began to dance.

They held each other like High School dances
                                in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
                                  and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness-
                                America- your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders-
                                under the tough old stars-
In the shadow of bluffs
                                   I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
                                    “What is to be done.”


by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island, 1974

The Waterwheel, by Jalaluddin Rumi

Hello Poets,
On the mend from hacking cough and sore bones, likely picked up in East Texas protesting the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Friends, we're at that point between a climate on the edge and one that's over. So, stay together, raise a hue and cry, never look away and never, never forget what's at stake.
Best,
Sam

The Waterwheel

Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.

Our friendship is made
of being awake.

The waterwheel accepts water
and turns and gives it away,
weeping.

That way it stays in the garden,
whereas another roundness rolls
through a dry riverbed looking
for what it thinks it wants.

Stay here, quivering with each moment
like a drop of mercury.


by Jalaluddin Rumi, from The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition,
translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks, 2004