A Message from the Wanderer by William E Stafford

Today outside your prison I stand
and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;
you have relatives outside. And there are
thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago I bent my skill to keep my
cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies,
and shouted my plans to jailers;
but always new plans occured to me,
or the new heavy locks bent hinges off,
or some stupid jailer would forget
and leave the keys.

Inside, I dreamed of constellations—
those feeding creatures outlined by stars,
their skeletons a darkness between jewels,
heroes that exist only where they are not.

Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought,
just as—often, in light, on the open hills—
you can pass an antelope and not know
and look back, and then—even before you see—
there is something wrong about the grass.
And then you see.

That’s the way everything in the world is waiting.

Now—these few more words, and then I’m
gone: Tell everyone just to remember
their names, and remind others, later, when we
find each other. Tell the little ones
to cry and then go to sleep, curled up
where they can. And if any of us get lost,
if any of us cannot come all the way—
remember: there will come a time when
all we have said and all we have hoped
will be all right.

There will be that form in the grass.

Cartographies of Silence by Adrienne Rich

1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.
2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
The syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word
3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
5.
The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan
Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words
stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.
6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others
7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew
If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn
till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare
8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingers
or the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain
for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

Sappho Fragment Forty by H.D.

Love . . . bitter sweet — Sappho

1
Keep love and he wings,
with his bow,
up, mocking us,
keep love and he taunts us
and escapes.

Keep love and he sways apart
in another world,
outdistancing us.

Keep love and he mocks,
ah, bitter and sweet,
your sweetness is more cruel
than your hurt.

Honey and salt
fire burst from the rocks
to meet fire
spilt from Hesperus.

Fire darted aloft and met fire:
in that moment
love entered us.

2
Could Eros be kept?
he were prisoned long since
and sick with imprisonment;
could Eros be kept?
others would have broken
and crushed out his life.

Could Eros be kept?
we too sinning, by Kypris,
might have prisoned him outright.

Could Eros be kept?
nay, thank him and the bright goddess
that he left us.

3
Ah, love is bitter and sweet,
but which is more sweet,
the sweetness
or the bitterness?
none has spoken it.

Love is bitter,
but can salt taint sea flowers,
grief, happiness?

Is it bitter to give back
love to your lover
if he crave it?

Is it bitter to give back
love to your lover
if he wish it
for a new favourite?
who can say,
or is it sweet?

Is it sweet
to possess utterly?
or is it bitter,
bitter as ash?

4
I had thought myself frail;
a petal,
with light equal
on leaf and under leaf.

I had thought myself frail;
a lamp,
shell, ivory, or crust of pearl;
about to fall shattered,
with flame spent.

I cried:
“I must perish,
I am deserted,
an outcast, desperate
in this darkness,”
(such fire rent me with Hesperus,)
then the day broke.

5
What need of a lamp
when day lightens us,
what need to bind love
when love stands
with such radiant wings
over us?

What need–
yet to sing love,
love must first shatter us.

Reincarnate by Joseph U Harris

Somewhere my spirit, in the long ago,
Communed with yours, or in some ancient land
I walked and talked with you. I have clasped your hand

Before, somewhere, and in your eyes I know
That I have sometimes seen an answering glow
Of hope, and longing. (Do you understand?)
It seems as if in Time’s eternal sand
Bright memory-grains illumined the dull flow
Of dead hours that make up futurity;
And out of dreams that I have dreamed there rise
Visions of you which quell my discontent.
Almost I think rare moments we have spent
Together thrill me with a sweet surprise
As they troop back into my memory.

More than myself by Anne Sexton

Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me . . .
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It’s small thing
to rage inside your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself.

Blind by Egmont Hegel Arens

Seeking God
I went to where men worship His name:
A lofty temple.

“Give us this day our daily bread !”
They whined
Fervently.

The sleek priest was thinking of his dinner with
wine after the sermon,
And the deacon was gloating over his neighbor’s
wickedness,
And the bald-headed man up in front was thinking
of a pair of legs that belonged to a chorus girl,
And the pretty woman with the baby eyes was
thinking of nothing at all, singing hymns only
with her mouth,
And the ugly old lady with the hair-lip was hating
the beauty of her neighbor.

God didn’t seem anywhere in evidence,
And I started away
Thinking to find Him in his old haunts
Down by the river
Where the whip-poor-will in the willow-tree
Sings :
“Love-us-Lord ! Love-us-Lord !”

But you can’t keep God out
Even from churches. . . .
Up in the choir was a blind girl
Singing:

“Tho dark my way
Lead Thou me on!”

Peace Walk by William E. Stafford

We wondered what our walk should mean,
taking that un-march quietly;
the sun stared at our signs— “Thou shalt not kill.”

Men by a tavern said, “Those foreigners . . .”
to a woman with a fur, who turned away—
like an elevator going down, their look at us.

Along a curb, their signs lined across,
a picket line stopped and stared
the whole width of the street, at ours: “Unfair.”

Above our heads the sound truck blared—
by the park, under the autumn trees—
it said that love could fill the atmosphere:

Occur, slow the other fallout, unseen,
on islands everywhere—fallout, falling
unheard. We held our poster up to shade our eyes.

At the end we just walked away;
no one was there to tell us where to leave the signs.

Often rebuked, yet always back returning by Emily Bronte

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things that cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

The tale of a mouse by Lewis Carroll

“Mine is a long and a sad tale!”
“It is a long tail, certainly,
but why do you call it sad?”
Turn witch into fairy.

Fury said to a mouse,
That he met in the house,
“Let us both go to law:
I will prosecute you. — Come,
I’ll take no denial;
We must have a trial:
For really this morning
I’ve nothing to do.”

Said the mouse to the cur,
“Such a trial, dear Sir,
With no jury or judge,
would be wasting our breath.”
“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,”
Said cunning old Fury:
“I’ll try the whole cause,
and condemn you to death.”

After Frost by Robert Creeley

He comes here
by whatever way he can,
not too late,
not too soon.

He sits, waiting.
He doesn’t know
why he should
have such a patience.

He sits at a table
on a chair.
He is comfortable
sitting there.

No one else
in this room,
no others, no expectations,
no sounds.

Had he walked
another way,
would he be here,
like they say.