Gratitude: July 27, 2023

Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler

visiting a past self. Being anywhere makes me thirsty.
When I wake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.
As a boy, I spit a peach pit onto my father’s prayer rug and immediately

it turned into a locust. Its charge: devour the vast fields of my ignorance.
The Prophet Muhammad described a full stomach as containing
one-third food, one-third liquid, and one-third air.

For years, I kept a two-fists-long beard and opened my mouth only to push air out.
One day I stopped in a lobby for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres
and ever since, the life of this world has seemed still. Every night,

the moon unpeels itself without affectation. It’s exhausting, remaining
humble amidst the vicissitudes of fortune. It’s difficult
to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having.

Kaveh Akbar

Gratitude: July 26, 2023

My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Mark Strand

Gratitude: July 25, 2023

A Center  

You must hold your quiet center,

where you do what only you can do.

If others call you a maniac or a fool,

just let them wag their tongues. 

If some praise your perseverance, 

don't feel too happy about it—

only solitude is a lasting friend.

You must hold your distant center.

Don't move even if earth and heaven quake. 

If others think you are insignificant,

that's because you haven't held on long enough.

As long as you stay put year after year,

eventually you will find a world

beginning to revolve around you. 

Ha Jin

Gratitude: July 11, 2023

1. 희망

2. After the Fire

You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind? I live in the low parts now, most
days a little hazy with fever and waiting
for the water to stop shivering out of the
body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.

Ada Limon

Gratitude: July 8, 2023

1. #readalittlepoetry

The Undertaking 

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck. 

Louise Gluck

Gratitude: July 5, 2023

1.  낭만 

2. “To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies' arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.” 

― Audre Lorde

3.

Gratitude: July 3, 2023

Burrboy: Part Deux

#puppabenaughtyupindaprairie

Hum

What is this dark hum among the roses?

The bees have gone simple, sipping,

that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?

They're small creatures and they are

filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not

moan in happiness? The little

worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.

Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand

that life is a blessing. I have found them — haven't you? —

stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings

a little tattered — so much flying about, to the hive,

then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,

should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.

I think there isn't anything in this world I don't

admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I

haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,

and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and

read books, I have to

take them off and bend close to study and

understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact

as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,

it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee

nuzzling like that into the blouse

of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course

the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over

all of us. 

Mary Oliver

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

Mark Nepo

Gratitude: July 2, 2023

❤️#burrboy❤️