Nothing Remains by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Nothing remains of unrecorded ages
That lie in the silent cemetery of time;
Their wisdom may have shamed our wisest sages,
Their glory may have been indeed sublime.
How weak do seem our strivings after power,
How poor the grandest efforts of our brains,
If out of all we are, in one short hour
Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Spaces,
Time and decay uproot the forest trees.
Even the mighty mountains leave their places,
And sink their haughty heads beneath strange seas;
The great earth writhes in some convulsive spasm
And turns the proudest cities into plains.
The level sea becomes a yawning chasm –
Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Forces,
The sad seas cease complaining and grow dry;
Rivers are drained and altered in their courses,
Great stars pass out and vanish from the sky.
Ideas die and old religions perish,
Our rarest pleasures and our keenest pains
Are swept away with all we hate or cherish –
Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Nameless
And all-creative spirit of the Law,
Uncomprehended, comprehensive, blameless,
Invincible, resistless, with no flaw;
So full of love it must create forever,
Destroying that it may create again
Persistent and perfecting in endeavor,
It yet must bring forth angels, after men –
This, this remains.

The Woman who Laughs at Life and Death by Noémia de Sousa

Out there beyond the swerve
the ancestral spirits await me

Soon, very soon,
I will take my place among my forebears

To the land I will leave the remnants of my useless body,
the corneous nails of all efforts,
this casing furrowed by the spider of time

Before I am called to speak with the voice of a nyanga
each day is a victory
I greet it with the irreverent laughter of my secret triumph

Oyo, oyo, life!

Out there beyond the swerve
the ancestral spirits await me

Thunder, from the Nag Hammadi

…
I am one who is honored, praised, and scornfully despised.
I am peace, and war has come because of me.
I am alien and citizen.
I am the substance and one without substance.

Those unconnected to me are unfamiliar with me,
and those in my substance know me.
Those close to me are ignorant of me,
and those far away have known me.
On the day I am close to you, you are far,
and on the day I am far, I am close to you.

I am . . . within.
I am . . . of natures.
I am . . . of created spirits,
the request of souls.
I am control and the uncontrollable.
I am union and dissolution.
I abide and dissolve.
I am below and they come up to me.
I am judgment and acquittal.
I am sinless,
and the root of sin comes from me.
I am lust outwardly, yet within me is control.
I am hearing for all, and my speech is indecipherable.
I am an unspeaking mute
and enormous in my many words.

Hear me in gentleness and discover me in roughness.
I am the woman crying out
and cast upon the face of the earth.
I prepare bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out
and I listen.
I appear . . . walk in . . . I am . . . the defense.
I am called truth and iniquity. . . .

You honor me and whisper against me.
You, the vanquished, judge those who vanquish you
before they judge you,
because in you the judge and partiality exist.
If you are condemned by one, who will acquit you?
If acquitted by him, who will arrest you?
What is in you is outside,
and one who fashions you on the outside
shapes you inside.
What you see outside you see within you.
It is visible and your garment.
Hear me, hearers,
and find out about my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing all can reach;
I am speech undecipherable.
I am the name of the sound
and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter
and the designation of the division.
I . . . light . . . great power . . . will not move the name . . .
to the one who created me.
I will speak his name.

Breath by Birago Diop

Listen more to things
Than to words that are said.
The water’s voice sings
And the flame cries
And the wind that brings
The woods to sighs
Is the breathing of the dead.

Those who are dead have never gone away.
They are in the shadows darkening around,
They are in the shadows fading into day,
The dead are not under the ground.
They are in the trees that quiver,
They are in the woods that weep,
They are in the waters of the rivers,
They are in the waters that sleep.
They are in the crowds, they are in the homestead.
The dead are never dead.

Listen more to things
Than to words that are said.
The water’s voice sings
And the flame cries
And the wind that brings
The woods to sighs
Is the breathing of the dead.
Who have not gone away
Who are not under the ground
Who are never dead.

Those who are dead have never gone away.
They are at the breast of the wife.
They are in the child’s cry of dismay
And the firebrand bursting into life.
The dead are not under the ground.
They are in the fire that burns low
They are in the grass with tears to shed,
In the rock where whining winds blow
They are in the forest, they are in the homestead.
The dead are never dead.

Listen more to things
Than to words that are said.
The water’s voice sings
And the flame cries
And the wind that brings
The woods to sighs
Is the breathing of the dead.

And repeats each day
The Covenant where it is said
That our fate is bound to the law,
And the fate of the dead who are not dead
To the spirits of breath who are stronger than they.
We are bound to Life by this harsh law
And by this Covenant we are bound
To the deeds of the breathings that die
Along the bed and the banks of the river,
To the deeds of the breaths that quiver
In the rock that whines and the grasses that cry
To the deeds of the breathings that lie
In the shadow that lightens and grows deep
In the tree that shudders, in the woods that weep,
In the waters that flow and the waters that sleep,
To the spirits of breath which are stronger than they
That have taken the breath of the deathless dead
Of the dead who have never gone away
Of the dead who are not now under the ground.

Listen more to things
Than to words that are said.
The water’ voice sings
And the flame cries
And the wind that brings
The woods to sighs
Is the breathing of the dead.

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.

Your Face by Rumi

You may be planning departure, as a human soul  
leaves the world taking almost all its sweetness  
with it. You saddle your horse.

You must be going. Remember you have friends  
here as faithful as grass and sky.

Have I failed you? Possibly you’re 
angry. But remember our nights of conversation,  
the well work, yellow roses by ocean,

the longing, the archangel Gabriel  
saying So be it. Shamsi Tabriz, your face,  
is what every religion tries to remember.

Wisdom by Makeda

Wisdom is
sweeter than honey,
brings more joy
than wine,
illumines
more than the sun,
is more precious
than jewels.
She causes
the ears to hear
and the heart to comprehend.

I love her
like a mother,
and she embraces me
as her own child.
I will follow
her footprints
and she will not cast me away.

An Unexpected Intimacy by D.M. Black

This afternoon I picked up a warm stone
– I was wanting to fix a hole that had appeared in the pathway –
and I had to check a sudden urge to apologise,
as if I had inadvertently
intruded on something to which my wants were entirely irrelevant.
I seemed to have broken in on a life that had been in progress for millions of years,
always uncelebrated, always in private, through heat, cold, pressure, exposure,
washing, melting, and grinding, and that suddenly now
on this unseasonally sunny late-October afternoon, had been plucked from its
voiceless destiny
to become a part of the intense fast-moving transparent flood of verbally architected
consciousness
that we call history in our dismayingly blinkered fashion;
and its character until that moment, which to it was to be an unthought piece of the
breathing universe,
nameless, abiding, ceaselessly changing, without significance,
turned in my hand, and without an instant’s delay, into an object of use and
comparison,
with a purpose not its own purpose, but to do with buggies and bicycles
that it had never in all its millions of years conceived, and that it was certainly
not equipped for understanding – and yet also, I thought,
warm like human skin, naked, and friendly, and intimate,
so that I wanted to say: O I’m sorry! (but at the same time, how nice to encounter
you!):
I hadn’t realised you were there.

Weighing In by Rhina P. Espaillat

What the scale tells you is how much the earth
has missed you, body, how it wants you back
again after you leave it to go forth

into the light. Do you remember how
earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock
you in their arms, warm in the flow

that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began
to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick
at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin,

and finally to stoke you, body, drumming
intimate coded messages through music
you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming

and your poems and your obedient blood.
Body, how useful you became, how lucky,
heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad,

sometimes, imagining that greedy zero
you must have been, that promising empty sack
of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow.

But look at you now, body, soft old shoe
that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look
how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

Remember by Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.