InnerVentures

Category: Poetry by others

  • The Peace of Wild Things

    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

    – Wendell Berry

  • Sometimes a Wild God – by Tom Hirons

    Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
    He is awkward and does not know the ways
    Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
    His voice makes vinegar from wine.

    When the wild god arrives at the door,
    You will probably fear him.
    He reminds you of something dark
    That you might have dreamt,
    Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.

    He will not ring the doorbell;
    Instead he scrapes with his fingers
    Leaving blood on the paintwork,
    Though primroses grow
    In circles round his feet.

    You do not want to let him in.
    You are very busy.
    It is late, or early, and besides…
    You cannot look at him straight
    Because he makes you want to cry.

    The dog barks.
    The wild god smiles,
    Holds out his hand.
    The dog licks his wounds
    And leads him inside.

    The wild god stands in your kitchen.
    Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
    Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
    And wrens have begun to sing
    An old song in the mouth of your kettle.

    ‘I haven’t much,’ you say
    And give him the worst of your food.
    He sits at the table, bleeding.
    He coughs up foxes.
    There are otters in his eyes.

    When your wife calls down,
    You close the door and
    Tell her it’s fine.
    You will not let her see
    The strange guest at your table.

    The wild god asks for whiskey
    And you pour a glass for him,
    Then a glass for yourself.
    Three snakes are beginning to nest
    In your voicebox. You cough.

    Oh, limitless space.
    Oh, eternal mystery.
    Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
    Oh, miracle of life.
    Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.

    You cough again,
    Expectorate the snakes and
    Water down the whiskey,
    Wondering how you got so old
    And where your passion went.

    The wild god reaches into a bag
    Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
    He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
    Raises an eyebrow
    And all the birds begin to sing.

    The fox leaps into your eyes.
    Otters rush from the darkness.
    The snakes pour through your body.
    Your dog howls and upstairs
    Your wife both exults and weeps at once.

    The wild god dances with your dog.
    You dance with the sparrows.
    A white stag pulls up a stool
    And bellows hymns to enchantments.
    A pelican leaps from chair to chair.

    In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
    Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
    Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
    The hills echo and the grey stones ring
    With laughter and madness and pain.

    In the middle of the dance,
    The house takes off from the ground.
    Clouds climb through the windows;
    Lightning pounds its fists on the table.
    The moon leans in through the window.

    The wild god points to your side.
    You are bleeding heavily.
    You have been bleeding for a long time,
    Possibly since you were born.
    There is a bear in the wound.

    ‘Why did you leave me to die?’
    Asks the wild god and you say:
    ‘I was busy surviving.
    The shops were all closed;
    I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’

    Listen to them:

    The fox in your neck and
    The snakes in your arms and
    The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
    The great un-nameable beasts
    In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…

    There is a symphony of howling.
    A cacophony of dissent.
    The wild god nods his head and
    You wake on the floor holding a knife,
    A bottle and a handful of black fur.

    Your dog is asleep on the table.
    Your wife is stirring, far above.
    Your cheeks are wet with tears;
    Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
    A black bear is sitting by the fire.

    Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
    He is awkward and does not know the ways
    Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
    His voice makes vinegar from wine
    And brings the dead to life.

  • The Thing Is.. by Ellen Bass

    “The Thing Is”
    from Mules of Love

    to love life, to love it even
    when you have no stomach for it
    and everything you’ve held dear
    crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
    your throat filled with the silt of it.
    When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
    thickening the air, heavy as water
    more fit for gills than lungs;
    when grief weights you like your own flesh
    only more of it, an obesity of grief,
    you think, How can a body withstand this?
    Then you hold life like a face
    between your palms, a plain face,
    no charming smile, no violet eyes,
    and you say, yes, I will take you
    I will love you, again.

  • Everything is Waiting for You by David Whyte

    Your great mistake is to act the drama
    as if you were alone. As if life
    were a progressive and cunning crime
    with no witness to the tiny hidden
    transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
    the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
    even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
    the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
    out your solo voice You must note
    the way the soap dish enables you,
    or the window latch grants you freedom.
    Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
    The stairs are your mentor of things
    to come, the doors have always been there
    to frighten you and invite you,
    and the tiny speaker in the phone
    is your dream-ladder to divinity.

    Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
    the conversation. The kettle is singing
    even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
    have left their arrogant aloofness and
    seen the good in you at last. All the birds
    and creatures of the world are unutterably
    themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

    — David Whyte
    from Everything is Waiting for You
    ©2003 Many Rivers Press

  • This Flower Alone by Lyla June Johnson

    This flower alone,
    which at once
    is beauty
    is rooted in beauty
    and whose petals
    reach out to beauty

    This flower alone,
    whose quiet song is drowned
    by the blasts and by
    the evening news
    of the modern world

    (but is heard
    by the lucky few
    who bend to listen)

    This flower alone,
    and the ambrosia
    it plants in every cell
    of my being

    This flower standing here alone,
    living proof of wonder;
    living proof of hope;
    living proof of beauty;
    living proof that God’s love for humanity
    has not lost its devotion.

    This flower alone,
    who sits patiently like
    a prophecy waiting
    to be known

    This flower alone,
    like a messenger in the dark of night
    telling me
    that everything
    is going to be
    alright

    This flower alone,
    is enough to change my life forever.

    The glittering distractions of the information age vanish
    and there is only me, the lover,
    and you, the wonder.

    And if the only beauty alive in the world was this flower
    and if all the rest was chaos,
    this flower alone,
    would still instruct me by sensation
    that I am held in the arms
    of something greater.

    And if my whole life was colored by darkness and destruction
    to one day be so blessed as to just behold this flower,
    that alone
    would be worth
    my birth
    and my dying.

    This flower alone

    has
    in a moment
    deprogrammed my mind

    to eat faith and not fear
    to wait on joy and not sorrow
    to expect communion and not solitude
    to face the fires of the world with this unwavering knowing
    of beauty and all the fruit it brings.

    This flower alone,
    in its unassuming tenderness and grace
    has in a moment
    incinerated my grief
    like sweetgrass in the flames
    and left behind only the
    scent of what is real.

    These eyes can see
    finally
    the beautiful song sung
    all around.

    And if I could rest
    in this place
    for just a moment
    I would remember who you are
    and who I am
    and where we are
    and how it is supposed to be
    for everyone.

    See more of Lyla’s writings at http://www.sodizin.net

  • Go To The Limits Of Your Longing –

    “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” from the Book Of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke

    translation by Joanna Macy + Anita Barrows

    God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

    then walks with us silently out of the night.
    These are the words we dimly hear:
    You, sent out beyond your recall,

    go to the limits of your longing.

    Embody me.
    Flare up like a flame

    and make big shadows I can move in.
    Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
    
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
    
Don’t let yourself lose me.
    Nearby is the country they call life.

    You will know it by its seriousness.

    Give me your hand.

  • A Map to the Next World – by Joy Harjo

    In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map
    for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

    My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields,
    from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

    For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

    The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light.
    It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

    In the legend are instructions on the language of the land,
    how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

    Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money.
    They best describe the detour from grace.

    Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a fog steals our children while we sleep.

    Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the monsters are born there of nuclear anger.

    Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.

    IMG_0003

    We no longer know the names of the birds here,
    how to speak to them by their personal names.

    Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

    What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map.
    Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us,
    leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles and wasted blood.

    An imperfect map will have to do little one.

    The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood,
    your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another.

    There is no exit.

    The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine —
    a spiral on the road of knowledge.

    You will travel through the membrane of death,
    smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast
    of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

    They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

    And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X,
    no guide book with words you can carry.

    You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing.

    Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

    And lights the map printed with the blood of history,
    a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

    When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers
    where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

    You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

    A white deer will come to greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

    Remember the hole of our shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.

    We were never perfect.

    Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth
    who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

    We might make them again, she said.

    Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

    You must make your own map.

    ~ Joy Harjo ~

  • Words from Chameli Ardagh & David Whyte.

    Longing for the real:

    It requires an awesome vulnerability to step out of the numbing comfort of casualness, out of the confinement of the small me-plan,
 finding yourself trembling in the unknown land 
beyond the limits of who you have taken yourself to be.
 Here all you have to hold onto is your love.

    In the shedding of the borrowed, the outdated, the strategic,
 the too small clothes, you become translucent,
 more shakti flows unrestricted through you. 
You are a medicine woman (or man) pouring healing
 into our aching longing for the real, 
a lighthouse in this world so full of plastic and replicas.

    You heal us just by your willingness to be you.

    ~ Chameli Ardagh

    Remember the way you are all possibilities

    you can see and how you live best
    as an appreciator of horizons,
    whether you reach them or not.

    Admit that once you have got up
    from your chair and opened the door,
    once you have walked out into the clean air
    toward that edge and taken the path up high
    beyond the ordinary, you have become
    the privileged and the pilgrim,
    the one who will tell the story
    and the one, coming back
    from the mountain,
    who helped to make it.

    ~ David Whyte

  • A Walk – 1924 by Rainer Maria Rilke

    IMG_0348   I want to share one of my favourite short poems. Rilke is speaking of something elusive and subtle – hard to grasp. But to me thats the point, that is where the longing is, just beyond my grasp. And yet I somehow know I am being held. I just need to remember that when I feel the wind in my face, this is gesture enough.
    It speaks to me anyway. I hope it speaks to you too.

    A WALK – 1924. by Rainer Maria Rilke

    My eyes already touch the sunny hill
    Going far ahead of the road I have begun
    So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
    It has its inner light, even from a distance –
    And changes us, even if we do not reach it,
    Into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
    We already are.
    A gesture waves us on, answering our own wave;
    But what we feel is the wind in our faces.

  • Santiago by David Whyte

    I have been meaning to post a poem by David Whyte, whose work I admire and a friend on Facebook just posted this. I loved it, so am pleased to include it in my blog:

    SANTIAGO

    The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding
    then revealing the way you should take,
    the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
    to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
    when you thought you would fall, and the way forward
    always in the end the way that you came,
    the way that you followed, the way that carried
    you into your future, that brought you
    to this place, no matter that it sometimes took
    your promise from you, no matter that it always had to break
    your heart along the way, the sense of having walked
    from far inside yourself out into the revelation,
    to have risked yourself for something that seemed
    to stand both inside you and far beyond you,
    that called you back in the end to the only road
    you could follow, walking as you did, in your
    rags of love and speaking in the voice
    that by night, became a prayer for safe arrival…

    Excerpt from “SANTIAGO”
    From PILGRIM: Poems by David Whyte