Advice to the young by Miriam Waddington

1
Keep bees and
grow asparagus,
watch the tides
and listen to the
wind instead of
the politicians
make up your own
stories and believe
them if you want to
live the good life.

2
All rituals
are instincts
never fully
trust them but
study to im-
prove biology
with reason.

3
Digging trenches
for asparagus
is good for the
muscles and
waiting for the
plants to settle
teaches patience
to those who are
usually in too
much of a hurry.

4
There is morality
in bee-keeping
it teaches how
not to be afraid
of the bee swarm
it teaches how
not to be afraid of
finding new places
and building in them
all over again.

Ghazal: The Dark Times by Marilyn Hacker

Tell us that line again, the thing about the dark times…
“When the dark times come, we will sing about the dark times.”

They’ll always be wrong about peace when they’re wrong about justice…
Were you wrong, were you right, insisting about the dark times?

The traditional fears, the habitual tropes of exclusion
Like ominous menhirs, close into their ring about the dark times.

Naysayers in sequins or tweeds, libertine or ascetic
Find a sensual frisson in what they’d call bling about the dark times.

Some of the young can project themselves into a Marshall Plan future
Where they laugh and link arms, reminiscing about the dark times.

From every spot-lit glitz tower with armed guards around it
Some huckster pronounces his fiats, self-sacralized king, about the dark times.

In a tent, in a queue, near barbed wire, in a shipping container,
Please remember ya akhy, we too know something about the dark times.

Sindbad’s roc, or Ganymede’s eagle, some bird of rapacious ill omen
From bleak skies descends, and wraps an enveloping wing about the dark times.

You come home from your meeting, your clinic, make coffee and look in the mirror
And ask yourself once more what you did to bring about the dark times.

Equinox by Gillian Clarke

Tonight summer comes to a world remade.
Streets are carless. Silence treads the roads.
The sky is clear for a red kite sailing,
flamboyant, his flame ablaze on blue,
his wings and the fork of his tail
flexing on the wind.

Miles above in the high air over the fields,
over the flights of rooks, crows, gulls,
over the cities, the clouds, the atmosphere,
in the vault of heaven the ozone layer clears
of particulates, of nitrogen dioxide,
and we can breathe again.

Listen! in this clean new silence
that is not silent: birdsong,
a small wind in the trees,
the fall of a petal, an opening leaf,
a page turning,
your breath, mine.

And Soul by Eavan Boland

My mother died one summer—
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Empty deck chairs collected rain.
As I took my way to her
through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly
behind houses
and on curbsides, to pay her
the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something
I remembered
I heard once, that the body is, or is
said to be, almost all
water and as I turned southward, that ours is
a city of it,
one in which
every single day the elements begin
a journey towards each other that will never,
given our weather,
fail—
       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,
cloud color reaching into air,
the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,
salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,
as if that wasn’t enough, all of it
ending up almost every evening
inside our speech—
coast canal ocean river stream and now
mother and I drove on and although
the mind is unreliable in grief, at
the next cloudburst it almost seemed
they could be shades of each other,
the way the body is
of every one of them and now
they were on the move again—fog into mist,
mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze
that lay on the railings of
the house she was dying in
as I went inside.

The Skeptics by Dorothy Walters

We were the skeptics,
the ones who knew
that nothing exists
beyond our knowing,
our certitude that what we saw
was what there was,
no need to go
beyond the edges
of our thought,
our need to be right.

Then one day
we were struck down
by Presence arriving
in a whirling cloud
of light,
a wind tearing
our clothes away,
our skin was now suffused with gold,
and we no longer remembered
what it was we knew.

The Birch-Tree at Loschwitz by Amy Levy

At Loschwitz above the city
The air is sunny and chill;

The birch-trees and the pine-trees
Grow thick upon the hill.

Lone and tall, with silver stem,
A birch-tree stands apart;
The passionate wind of spring-time
Stirs in its leafy heart.

I lean against the birch-tree,
My arms around it twine;
It pulses, and leaps, and quivers,
Like a human heart to mine.

One moment I stand, then sudden
Let loose mine arms that cling:
O God! the lonely hillside,
The passionate wind of spring!

Corona in the countryside II by Agi Mishol

Now that death creeps round
and I’m peeled down  
to a worn-out sweat suit,
down to clumps of cookie crumbs
and afterwards the striped toothpaste
that bursts from the tube

now that on mute
you can hear the wheat growing,
pecans pushing into their shells
and an unseen leaf that also for me
lies still upon the ground

now that they’ve told us to sit at home
I prefer to squeeze inside the “s”
of shelter-in-place,
even just inside a preposition
or the two falling tears
of a single quotation mark, now

as someone, in his dream,
soaps me in the bath with a blue sponge
and the blossoming of citrus fruit
is the indifferent smell-track to the whole scene,
I do as Rilke said:
I let beauty and terror happen to me
without thinking it’s final.

Water Remembers by Anna Adams

When frost draws fishbone and fern on windowpanes,

water is running through memories, tracing forms

like starry mosses, muscles and intricate brains.

                                                            Water has been there.

Thus, as liverwort tongues, it overlapped;

thus it feathered the coalmeasure forest fronds,

and thus it was combed by mermaidens’ cold webbed hands.

                                                            Water remembers

bloody adventures as Man, and many deaths

from which it emerged unscathed, as from the fire

water ascends as a ghost and descends as a shower.

                                                            Water reminds us

nothing that truly exists can ever be lost.

It recapitulates its countless loves,

having been present at every winesodden wedding

                                                            and virgin’s deflowering.

Water confetti falls on the winter forest,

loading all trees alike with spurious blossom,

heavy as fruit, that bends then breaks the branches.

                                                            Crutches of water

prop every plant in the forest. Making, unmaking,

water is omnipresent and taken for granted;

being, perhaps, mere ambassador, deputy, servant

                                                            of something forgotten.

From Naked Song by Lalla

I began as a bloom of cotton,
outdoors.  Then they brought me to a room
where they washed me.  Then the hard strokes
of the carder’s wife.  Then another woman
spun thin threads, twisting me
around her wheel.  Then the kicks
of the weaver’s loom made cloth, 
and on the washing stone, washermen
wet and slung me about
to their satisfaction, whitened me
with earth and bone,and cleaned me to my own 
amazement.  Then the scissors
of the tailor, piece by piece,
and his careful finishing work.

Now, at last, as clothes,
I find You and freedom.
This living is so difficult
before one takes 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; the fog steals our
children while we sleep.

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

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

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, leav-
ing 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 guidebook 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 greet you when the last human climbs from the
destruction.

Remember the hole of 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.