Give Me This by Ada Limon

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

No Second Troy by W. B. Yeats

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

 

"You cannot teach accountability to someone who's built their identity around avoiding it. Growth requires discomfort, and some people would rather sacrifice relationships than face themselves.

People build their identity around avoidance when accountability feels unsafe. If responsibility was met with punishment, shame, or withdrawal, they learned to survive by deflecting, blaming, and controlling the narrative. Avoidance, in many ways, became their armor.

As adults, the same defense shows up as denial, minimization, or justification.

They rewrite events to stay the victim. They intellectualize their behavior instead of feeling it. They distance themselves from the impact they've had on others because facing it would unravel who they believe they are."

How to Live by Todd Dillard

 

Depravity begins with thinking of love 

as a radical act. I quit loving 

with difficulty. I love

easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders.

They’ll fly away if I move. So I move.

I love flight. I love cages

left wide open. I am not a window.

I could be a window. Open me,

you’ll find a dense wood,

children wandering inside it.

Not lost children. They know the way.

They live the way horses run.

If they each had a bird in hand

they would open their hands.

 "Some people aren't speaking to you because they owe you an apology. Avoidance is often how unprocessed shame shows up, because sitting with the impact of their behavior would require accountability they're not ready for."

The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska

 

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won't

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Spider by Andrea Gibson

All of my pain is a spider 
I’ve learned not to crush 
with the heel of my shoe 

but to guide with a page 
of my journal 
into an empty glass. 

I ask questions about 
its life, its purpose 
as I walk careful 

out to the garden and rest 
it down on the earth. 
My pain—how happy 

it is to leave me 
whenever I treat it 
kind. 

“You cannot control the version of you that lives inside someone else’s mind.”

Stories I don’t want to tell

Lapse 

Rae Armantrout

1.

To keep my abridgment
consistent
with its previous iterations

and with those of others
is a nearly
all-consuming task,

allowing just a thin trickle
of the new
to be processed—

or so I’m told—

but those whose recaps
self-contradict
hardly seem better informed.

2.

When intention stutters,
it is not a pleasant
flicker.

Anyone can be
hypnotized
by blinking lights.

But one can also find
oneself
mesmerized by nothing

while deep inside,
in bones and gut,

the thoughts
think themselves.

omm: Jorie Graham's Killing Spree

whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefied
death, it was here to stay, it actually
had nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to be
revelation, longed to be part of
nature making its
whistling sounds above, its
screaming
below. The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about
in the dust-filled amnesia. Were we supposed to
wake up, or was it never sleep
again—sleep
a mind blown to bits
after each ordnance hits & the craters
open…
We are so late in this story.
Unable to tell our heroes from our tormentors.
Unable to be convinced ever again of
anything.
Convinced. The word like a year in which nothing happened, a day
blown off the record—the spree
an exhausted teacher unveiling yet again
the temporary
lesson.
You’d think it must be about great love.
You’d think it must be about
poverty or endgame or the provisional emergency visa
nobody ever received in time
so no exit from the spree
ever occurred…
So, no, friend,
stranger,
when your turn in line brought you to the desk, up front,
the teacher was a killer,
one of the very best,
and as he bent over his desk over his list looking for your name
you realized he was your old
professor of astronomy,
the one who taught you to see the stars—
what year was that—
the skies were still visible,
and the stars, the stars…You are afraid to look up now,
the guard towers so full of thirsty lights
so eager to make of you
a singular
example.
The paint has chipped off the legs of his table,
you can see that through these layers of desert-dust.
But once it had gleamed,
once it had stood at the front of the class,
behind it the huge night sky of the blackboard
where he had made his chalkmarks scratch
releasing the spidery calculations and then
the galaxies…
Those marks look now like
the tips of rifles,
though you hadn’t seen it then,
& they were all pointing straight at the class,
at you in your row, at us,
at our assembly line of questions.
We still had questions…
You were ready for the blindfold when they pulled it
from the drawer.
The dark felt silky over your burnt face.
You heard the sound of the shovel cutting the earth.
Where is your mother.
What is that springing forth,
that deep inhalation followed by
nothing.
It’s the trees. Listen to me, think of wind in trees.
Yes the drones pass over and this is their wind.
But it’s still a precious thing. A pure thing. Wind.
It will brush you as though there were leaves, as though there were trees.
When is the last time you saw trees.
You feel them begin to cut your hair.
You listen hard for your new wind, your drone.
You imagine the leaves.
Their glittering still there under the dust.
You can smell the old maps lying on the desk.
You hope a rat will find you,
you hope your fingers will still feel its small jaws,
its minuscule hunger.
You remember Saturn—how he’d drawn it, almost giddy,
its wings hatching wildly across the blackboard,
I lived you say
to no one in particular,
the key deep in your pocket they’ll never find,
yr hand closing round it—
& that time I came home late & the door was locked, u think,
I slept on the stoop
all through the night,
I will lie down now,
I will take off my shoes,
they will put me against the wall,
I will leave my mark—
& it’s then that the smell arrives
of rust, iron, acid & fresh cut roses—a thunder
of sweetness.
It is your blood as it explodes from you.
We hear the bullet.

Will it be erased from time itself now
the small stony hill
in which my village lay,
will it bleed out from me now
the cool stone floor, the water in the basin,
my window onto the olive groves,
the pigeons muttering in the lowest limbs—
& where will it go
where I overhear my father
thanking my mother—
late at night in the dark kitchen—
his thank you, thank you—this clicking of the stars
all round them—
where will it go, where will it be buried
my time,
will it rise up in no one ever again
as memory, as dream,
this moonlight’s scent over the fields
& in it the barefoot steps of my father
coming to see if I am
asleep.
And stars falling anytime I look—anytime—like magic—my luck.
And mother’s low song in the other room….

You who do not know any longer what song is,
or dream, or memory, or the sound of
stars—look up—don’t blink—here it is now the slit throat of the sky
where the endless beginning keeps
pouring itself
forth.

THE WORLD

didn’t change much

at first. At

first it

didn’t change

much, at first I

didn’t—I don’t—

change much.

At first we

didn’t & they

didn’t & the atmosphere

stayed the same

or enough to seem

the same. The same.

I say the word

out loud to my-

self. Who changed I

think. What started out & then

disappeared without

actually dis-

appearing. It’s so quiet

in here. It’s so

quiet now. The now

used to be a noisy

place & now

it is so

still. Where is everyone

I think. What is it

that is dis-

possessed. Can it ever be re-

possessed. Never?

Now and again your soul

wakes up in

spurts asking

what is—or is there—a just

struggle. Then you,

then I, cry out

where are you

everyone. We were in one world

& then was it u or

us or them or no one in

particular—in

particular my heart

leaps at that—oh

in particular—but no one

answers & no one

came along in the end.

And that was when

the end began.

I only just realized

it. Only just heard

no one survived—or is it they

still hide, above

the cries, no

child, no one

replies, no one not

blind, confined,

lined up, wired up, piled

up, made to

comply, des-

pised, compromised, the soul perpetually dis-

guised, the words even

the right words

cannot be un-

furled from breath from

mind oh

memory no cannot be

dug up dug up from

this buried world.

All reactions:

Omm: Defense Mechanisms

 

1. Repression: Unconsciously pushing distressing thoughts, feelings, or memories out of conscious awareness.
Denial: Refusing to accept or acknowledge the reality of a traumatic or anxiety-producing situation.
Projection: Attributing one’s own unacceptable or threatening thoughts, feelings, or motives onto someone else.
Displacement: Redirecting an impulse, emotion, or reaction from a dangerous or unacceptable target to a safe, less threatening one.
Reaction Formation: Behaving in a way that is the exact opposite of one's true, often uncomfortable or unacceptable, feelings.
Rationalization: Creating false but seemingly logical justifications to explain away unacceptable behavior or negative outcomes.
Intellectualization: Focusing on the intellectual, logical, or academic aspects of a distressing situation to avoid experiencing the painful emotions tied to it.
Sublimation: Channeling unacceptable urges, impulses, or frustrations into socially acceptable, productive behaviors or activities.
Regression: Reverting to an earlier, more childlike stage of development or behavior when faced with stress.
Suppression: The conscious, intentional act of pushing distressing thoughts or feelings aside, with the plan to address them later.
Compensation: Overachieving in one area to make up for perceived deficiencies or weaknesses in another area.
Dissociation: Compartmentalizing or disconnecting from reality, one's identity, or one's physical surroundings in order to escape trauma or overwhelming stress.
Identification: Adopting the beliefs, behaviors, or characteristics of another person or group in order to feel more secure or capable.
Avoidance: Intentionally staying away from people, places, or situations that trigger distressing thoughts or emotions.
Conversion: Expressing psychological distress or an unconscious conflict through physical, bodily symptoms with no underlying medical cause.
Acting Out: Expressing an unconscious emotion or impulse directly through behavior rather than reflecting on or talking about the feeling.
Splitting: Viewing people or situations as entirely "all good" or "all bad," lacking the ability to see gray areas or ambivalence in others. 

The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

#additionbysubtraction

Each From Different Heights

Stephen Dunn

That time I thought I was in love

and calmly said so

was not much different from the time

I was truly in love

and slept poorly and spoke out loud

to the wall

and discovered the hidden genius

of my hands.

And the times I felt less in love,

less than someone,

were, to be honest, not so different

either.

Each was ridiculous in its own way

and each was tender, yes,

sometimes even the false is tender.

I am astounded

by the various kisses we’re capable of.

Each from different heights

diminished, which is simply the law.

And the big bruise

from the longer fall looked perfectly white

in a few years.

That astounded me most of all.

i take my glasses off

Lucille Clifton 

it is the hard

edge of things

i am avoiding

the separations

so that i can take my glasses off

and then i cannot tell

which are the leaves

and which the angels

like blake

like that man

who lived with the lepers

not noticing what was sin

and what was grace

visioning visions vision

i take my glasses off

so i can see

#poets

 “Most people don’t see you. They see how you make them feel.”

I don’t know if anyone knows how disingenuous you are. 

How you’ve cultivated a facade of sincerity and approachability that hides your cutting and callous nature. 

How scary inappropriate. Invasive. Indecent. Insecure you truly are.

How being born plain will always be an impossible hurdle for your super-sized ego to bear. 

How you exercise your ‘power’ over people by getting away with crossing boundaries and never getting caught doing the diabolical things you do.