This World

Czeslaw Milosz

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. 

Faith

Czeslaw Milosz

The word Faith means when someone sees

A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows

That they are, because they have to be.

And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes

And wished, the world would still be what it was,

And the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt

By a sharp rock, he also knows that rocks

Are here so they can hurt our feet.

Look, see the long shadow cast by the trees;

And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

In Black Despair

Czeslaw Milosz

In grayish doubt and black despair,

I drafted hymns to the earth and the air,

pretending to joy, although I lacked it.

The age had made lament redundant.

So here’s the question — who can answer it —

Was he a brave man or a hypocrite?

[The will to see 

oneself as fragile]

The will to see oneself as 

fragile, fallible, 

liable to fail. 



To consider a stranger and 

hear, in the mind’s ear, 

one’s true voice



insisting: I must change.

Ordinary people do this

Patient urgent work



alone and together

day upon day upon day.

Like my mother, once,



leading her ailing mother 

back through the maze 

of our suburban scrawl,



past ache, past haze, 

past confusion and rage

toward a neat room



where waited prayer,

fear, forgiveness, 

grief, grace. This



is a poem about kin 

and neighbors and nations 

adrift, in error, under siege.



This is a ceasefire poem. 

Tracy K. Smith

Dog Star

Take today. I want there
            to be less
of everything—wind

& worry, of leaves
            littering the ground
& love letters, addressee

unknown. Return
            to sender—
this, my quarrel

with what
            must be
told. No,

I insist, No.

Yet the wind won’t
            go away 
so easily, the stars remain

& do not grey—
            the boy looking
up into them thinks

he’s seeing them first
            tonight—it’s true,
here the sky & moon

do meet
            in an overgrown field—
nothing here 

tall enough to pretend
            to reach—even him
amazed at the blue,

even you.

Kevin Young

I.AM. NOT.A.MODEL.MINORITY

I come from family of  over-achievers…

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you. 

Charles Bukowski

For My Unwritten Poems

I write a poem for my unwritten poems,
for those that lie still in the rigid rest of nothingness,
as in the rest of reason—unemerged ideas.

How good the word is that has not yet been pronounced,
growing to its maturity in beds of silence
like the corn kernel in the field. 
Tomorrow perhaps the sun will crawl out
from the wind-swept, snowed-in heights,
and the seed
and the word
will rise into the blossoming beauty
of visible being.
Tomorrow perhaps there will be pain in the renewed white heat
of spring’s ascent towards bloom.

How good the kernel is,
that hibernates through years’ becoming
in the peace of its own essence,
beneath the earth,
like the bear after months of sleep— 
waiting, expecting
to awaken. 

Itshe Slutsky 

Upon Awakening

On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours

ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin,

we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be

divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.

Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties

with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our

thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our

thinking is cleared of wrong motives.

In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may

not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask

God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We

relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle. We are often

surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this

for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional

inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind.

Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious

contact with God, it is not probable that we are going to be

inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all

sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that

our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the

plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it.

We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer

that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to

be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such

problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and

are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may

ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are

careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of usSaddlebackclub.com

have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work. You

can easily see why.