It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror–
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who have suffered much.

― Czesław Miłosz, Facing The River

"It’s good to remember how to forget. I’m interested in the oral tradition: what keeps the poems alive is a little forgetting. In Homer you get the sense that anything could happen because the poet might not remember." ― Alice Oswald


Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone and liquid fishegg, desert
and saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches you is what you touch.

- Margaret Atwood

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

- Mary Oliver

Monday night in June,

….and the sky is slowly darkening. The feathery trees ahead dip down low, skimming the glittering lake. The evening mist surrounds us, coating us in silver, in deep green. All we can make out is the forests edge and small island in the middle of the water, a pale, dream-like lagoon. You pull the hood on your rain mac, angling your face towards the summer rain. This, you say, is your kind of weather.

Last week, the temperatures soared. The park was littered with barbeque residue, food carton and packets, beer cans, empty wine bottles. Out of the bushes came blue-headed ducks and shiny, well-fed crows. Squirrels stole loaves of bread from rubbish bins. South London was vibrant and stifling. Now, in the matter of a few days, the rain has cooled the city down. The perfume hangs off the wildflowers and surrounding sweet bush. The puddles on the ground catch the ever-changing light. It is good to walk at sunrise and again at sunset. Something about it sets the day. Something about it sets the night. There’s no mistaking the truth; these deliberate walks draw us closer to ourselves. They ward off the deep darks and the slow bads. Something about putting one foot in front of the other at pace, allowing new things to enter the field of vision, concentrating on nothing but breathing breaks the anxiety, eases the mind. Something about being slightly too cold for comfort, feeling the wind in our hair, breaking a slight sweat as our strides take the hills. Submitting to the will of nature brings us out of our heads and inside our hearts, limbs, breath.

One of the truest things about being human is that we see the world through particular filters, according to what we have experienced in the past and have now come to believe. This is no exact science, of course, and can hardly be relied upon. However you slice it, the past is always a different colour. Here in the present, we are often so desperately underwhelmed, distracted, scared. Scared! I often wonder why it is easy to prime ourselves for the worst when there are nothing but miracles happening around us. But reality is a many-pronged thing. Wildlife and ambulance sirens. Rainbows and horrible violence. Summertime and alcoholism. We live inside a circular wonder, yet the wonder completely escapes us most of the time. Everything is many things, and life happens in the places where we rest our attention.

You just asked me what I was thinking. How best to answer? How do we begin to try and explain any or all of the growing wilderness happening inside us? How do you say everything and nothing? How do you say colour and lights, fear of the end of us, arousal, excitement and grief,

and also, I love you? How do you say all of those things and mean all of these strange, twisting things at once? How do you put words to the doubt, the growing unease, the potential for boredom, destruction, rage?

I say, not much. Not much, because there are no adequate words for any of this, and I think you already know that. Every time we think we figure it out, there are always new equations to grasp, to worry over. Every time we solve the code, we realise the answer was stored inside us. There are no new words for the ahas and the oh yeses. They are always being born, and they are always as old as time.
​
Yrsa Daley-Ward

“People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.”

― Barbara Kingsolver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
   love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.           
 
 
Mary Oliver

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.
​
And if all that fails,
wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

​- Pat Schneider

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.” 

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

A sudden swirl of gabble, flutter,
    chatter, preen, and cluck
makes my yard into someone
    else’s conversation.
No stone goes unturned, no
    topic unpecked.
Even the dead rabbit I never
    mentioned to the kids
gets flipped and flopped about
    like last week’s gossip.
The children are alarmed,
    then amazed.
Better not to tell them this is me
    twenty years from now,
descending with cronies enroute
    to Florida or Arizona,
pinching the grandkids,
    noting with magpie eye
the looks that pass or don’t pass   
    between husband and wife.
Instead, I say, “It’s the flocking instinct.”
    “Winter’s coming.”
“They feel it in their bones and gather
    before flying south.”
Instinctively, I flex knees and elbows,
    crick my neck to peer
at the sky, continue the old seesaw
    bargain with Time.


Sheryl Slocum
Originally published in the Poets' Calendar, 2006

Tell me if this is all true, my lover?
    tell me if it is true.         
When the eyes of me flash their lightning on you,
    dark clouds in your breast make stormy answer;
Is it then true
    that the dew drops fall from the night when I am seen,
    and the morning light is glad when it wraps my body?         
 
Is it true, is it true, that your love
    travelled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?
    that when you found me at last, your age-long desire
    found utter peace in my gentle speech, and my eyes and lips and flowing hair?
 
Is it then true         
    that the mystery of the Infinite is written on this little brow of mine?
Tell me, my lover, if all this is true!

- Rabindranath Tagore

​All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know. 


Margaret Atwood

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

Hafiz

You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.

You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin.

You deserve a lover who wants to dance with you, who goes to paradise every time he looks into your eyes and never gets tired of studying your expressions.

You deserve a lover who listens when you sing, who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom; who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall.

​You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.

― Frida Kahlo

I often dreamed of watching without being seen. Of spying. Of being the perfect observer. Like that camera obscura I once made out of a shoebox. It photographed for me a part of the world through a black closed space with a microscopic pupil through which light sneaks inside. I was training.

The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled ‘Life’. Dutch painting. Moving lives.
Here at the door appears a man, in his hand he has a tray, he puts it on the table; two children and a woman sit down around it. They take their time eating, in silence, because the audio in this theatre doesn’t work. Then they move to the couch, watch a glowing screen attentively, but for me, standing on the street, it isn’t clear what has absorbed them so – I only see flickers, flutterings of light, tiny pictures, too brief and distant to be intelligible.

Someone’s face, a mouth moving intensely, a landscape, another face... Some say that this is a boring play and that nothing happens in it. But I like it – for example the movement of a foot playing unconsciously with a slipper, or the whole astonishing act of yawning. Or a hand that seeks upon a plush surface a remote control and – having found it – is calmed, withers.

Standing off to one side. Seeing only the world in fragments, there won’t be any other one. Moments, crumbs, fleeting configurations – no sooner have they come into existence than they fall to pieces. Life? There’s no such thing; I see lines, planes and bodies, and their transformations in time. Time, meanwhile, seems a simple instrument for the measurement of tiny changes, a school ruler with a simplified scale – it’s just three points: was, is and will be.

From Flights by Olga Tokarczuk ​

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire


​Margaret Atwood

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Pablo Neruda

Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking.
​Why else would the springtime falter?
Why would all our ardent longing bind itself in frozen, bitter pallor?
After all, the bud was covered all the winter.
What new thing is it that bursts and wears?
Yes, of course it hurts when buds are breaking, hurts for that which grows      
                    and that which bars.
 
Yes, it is hard when drops are falling.
Trembling with fear, and heavy hanging,
cleaving to the twig, and swelling, sliding -
weight draws them down, though they go on clinging.
Hard to be uncertain, afraid and divided,
hard to feel the depths attract and call,
yet sit fast and merely tremble -
hard to want to stay                    
                   and want to fall.
 
Then, when things are worst and nothing helps
the tree's buds break as in rejoicing,
then, when no fear holds back any longer,
down in glitter go the twig's drops plunging,
forget that they were frightened by the new,
forget their fear before the flight unfurled -
feel for a second their greatest safety,
rest in that trust
                   that creates the world.

- Karin Boye

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

​Maya Angelou
#IWD2018

I almost forgot, foolish me, I almost forgot, forgot
That where I am from we see the rain
Before the rain even starts to rain

No wonder, why you’ve been buggering me
Cause this walk, it’s a previous journey
And no wonder why the road seems so long
Cause I had done it all before
And I won

- Benjamin Clementine

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

― Pablo Neruda