Photo: South Portland, Maine – March 2019
Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within. – Teilhard de Chardin
Month: March 2019
Elegant by Linda Gregg
All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.
It’s ok for the rich
Title Poem – Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Bly)
It’s O.K. for the rich and the lucky to keep still;
no one wants to know about them anyway.
But those in need have to step forward,
have to say: I am blind,
or: I’m about to go blind,
or: nothing is going well with me,
or: I have a child who is sick,
or: right there I’m sort of glued together…
And probably that doesn’t do anything either.
They have to sing; if they didn’t sing, everyone
would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.
That’s where you hear good singing.
People really are strange: they prefer
to hear castratos in boy choirs.
But God himself comes and stays a long time
when the world of half-people start to bore him.
you will ride with the owls at night
Lazarus On A Train
Someone
on this train
is close to death
I look
out the window
like I’m midway
between Rome
and Bethany
still someone
may be dead
we all know
the smell
I pray it’s
not me again
Photo: Portland, Maine – January 2019
At the earliest ending of winter
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
BY WALLACE STEVENS
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
Photo, Solvang, CA – December 2017
the quarrel with ourselves
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. – William Butler Yeats
Photo: Lewiston, ME – February 2013
The old man…
today and every day we have a need for…
a need for permanence in a civilization of transience;
a need for the absolute when all else has become relative;
a need for silence in the midst of noise;
a need for gratuitousness in the face of unbelievable greed;
a need for poverty amid the flaunting of wealth;
a need for contemplation in a century of action, for without
contemplation, action risks become mere agitation;
a need for communication in a universe content with
entertainment and sensationalism;
a need for peace amid today’s universal outbursts of violence;
a need for quality to counterbalance the increasingly prevalent
response to quantity;
a need for humility to counteract the arrogance of power and
science;
a need for human warmth when everything is being rationalized
or computerized;
a need to belong to a small group rather than to be part of a crowd;
a need for slowness to compensate the present eagerness for
speed;
a need for truth when the real meaning of words is distorted in
political speeches and sometimes even in religious
discourses;
a need for transparency when everything seems opaque.
- J.P. Dumbois-Dumee
Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
