is new, and always new again.
And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.
Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.
My teacher told me one thing,
Live in the soul.
When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.
-- Lalla.
with a solid rope.
Will God hear?
Will he take me all the way?
Like water in goblets of unbaked clay
I drip out slowly,
and dry.
My soul whirls. Dizzy. Let me
discover my home.
--Lalla.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And there will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
-- Walt Whitman.
Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings --
five feet apart -- and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valley
of the snow ---
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows --
so I thought:
maybe death
isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us ---
as soft as feather ---
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow --
that is nothing but light -- scalding, aortal light --
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
Maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but light ...
-- Mary Oliver
The wild cries
Fall through the
Autumn Moonlight
But the geese
Have already gone
-- Thomas McGrath.
Tempered, annealed, the hard essence of autumn metals
finely forged, subtle, yet perdurable and straight,
By nature penetrating deep yet advancing by inches
to span all things yet stitch them up together,
Only needle-and-thread's delicate footsteps
are truly broad-ranging, yet without beginning!
"Withdrawing elegantly" to mend a loose thread,
and restore to white silk a lamb's down purity . . .
How can those who count pennies calculate their worth?
They may carve monuments yet lack all understanding.
-- Pan Zhao, 48-117?