Category: Poetry

“It is Not Enough” by David Whyte

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It is not enough to know.
It is not enough to follow
the inward road conversing in secret.

It is not enough to see straight ahead,
to gaze at the unborn
thinking the silence belongs to you.

It is not enough to hear
even the tiniest edge of rain.

You must go to the place
where everything waits,
there, when you finally rest,
even one word will do,
one word or the palm of your hand
turning outward
in the gesture of gift.

And now we are truly afraid
to find the great silence
asking so little.

One word, one word only.

“It is Not Enough” from Where Many Rivers Meet by David Whyte.  Copyright © 1990, 2004 by David Whyte.

“On Angels” by Czeslaw Milosz

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All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

– Czeslaw Milosz as printed in Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation (Harmony Press), edited by Roger Housden.

“No System for Grief” by Kimberly Grey

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You were in the world and. More
slowly now I am

so fasted now so. Long
it’s been without
you, if you ever read this
you were what. I was dreaming of

this welt, to know
it before. It comes like love
I loved your

empty spaces,

saved them a little
like. The sea
it’s dying, believe me,
long ago today

I was. Fond of saying time is
just wandering away, love,

you heard me once say

I am the lost shiny thing

you were. Designed for
this decade, jumped hoops to get me

and picture it, got through
but not this I’m not through
and. I will not miss this big sadness or.

How I heard your body break into such.

Fragments toward what. Bewilder meant.

“No System for Grief” by Kimberly Grey, originally published in Linebreak

“Breakage” by Mary Oliver

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I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

from Why I Wake Early: New Poems by Mary Oliver, published by Beacon Press, 2005.

“My Mother and Your Mother” by Richard Garcia

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My mother and your mother drinking tea in heaven—no, not heaven, but that place you go to live after you die and have acquired certain skills.

Your mother wants to take my mother to the PX to stock up on Folgers coffee, Ritz crackers, and a couple of cases of gin. My mother wants to go to the new senior center because she read in the paper they’ll be showing a movie with Mario Lanza. Finally they settle on Italy where your mother was happy for a while.

Your mother shows my mother the apartment where she lived, the echoing courtyard, and in between the same laundry still flapping on the line, the volcano. After a couple of cappuccinos on the Via Manzoni, your mother agrees, out of her Southern courtesy, to go with my mother to Mexico.

Today is the day she’ll relive being the small girl in the white dress that hands Porfiro Díaz a bouquet of flowers. Overcome with joy, El Presidente announces that he won’t run for office ever again. ¡Viva! Hats and bullets fly through the air and my mother takes credit for starting the Mexican Revolution.

Your mother wants to go home to Charleston and eat some cheese pie made out of eggs, brown sugar, and butter. Mine wants to eat those hotcakes again she had the first time she crossed the border and thought, What strange tortillas these Gringos eat. As a compromise, they come to see how we’re doing in L.A.

But once here they forget why they came. My mother and your mother, on Olvera Street trying on straw hats. Your mother and my mother at the perfume counter in Bloomingdale’s, spraying Chanel N°5 on their wrists.

My mother and your mother at Musso and Frank’s. Your mother is deep into her peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. Mine is table-hopping, collecting autographs. She can’t believe her luck, there’s Gilbert Roland having a martini with Dolores Del Rio.

 

“My Mother and Your Mother” from Richard Garcia‘s The Persistence of Objects, © BOA Editions, Ltd 2006.