Tag: love

poem for labour day

sun-flower (black-eyed susan in millennium park, peterborough · ben wolfe

the world is as it is
because
we followed the rules,
did as we were trained

used ‘best practices’
rather than love
or our higher brains

what if
(at first for just a half an hour a day,
until our long-domesticated hopes
recall the taste of it)

we tell each other,
tell our disbelieving selves

that in the quickening of that slower time
our highest aspirations
are the rules

our longings are the compass
and the map,

the light that knows
and shows the next small step,

the whispering seed
that knows it is a tree

and we are free
to hear each still-small voice

— September 4, 2017 / April 29, 2022

love and fear

love and fear are the two directions,
i stand at each infinite end

my straddling feet make the circle complete
a line is a circle
once you know
it can
bend

— spring 2005

 

How To Be a Poet

(by Wendell Berry)
(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.