Tagore says

Listen, can you hear it?
His bamboo flute speaks
the pure language of love.
The moon enlightens the trees,
the path, the sinuous Yamuna.

Oblivious of the jasmine's scent
I stagger around,
disheveled heart bereft of modesty,
eyes wet with nerves and delight.
Tell me, dear friend, say it aloud:
is he not my own Dark Lord Syama?
Is it not my name his flute pours
into the empty evening?

For eons I longed for God,
I yearned to know him.
That's why he has come to me now,
deep emerald Lord of my breath.
O Syama, whenever your faraway flute thrills
through the dark, I say your name,
only your name, and will my body to dissolve
in the luminous Yamuna.

Go to her, Lord, go now.
What's stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let's go. I'll walk with you.







            -what to call the urgings of the heart?

To the Sacred Heart of Jesus

O Heart of Jesus, treasure of tenderness
You Yourself are my happiness, my only hope.
You who knew how to charm my tender youth,
Stay near me till the last night.
Lord,  to you alone I've given my life,
And all my desires are well-known to you.
It's in your ever-infinite goodness
That I want to lose myself,  O Heart of Jesus!

Ah!  I know well,  all our righteousness
Is worthless in your sight.
To give value to my sacrifices,
I want to cast them into your Divine Heart.
You did not find your angels without blemish.
In the midst of lightening you gave your law!...
I hide myself in your Sacred Heart,  Jesus.
I do not fear,  my virtue is You! . . .

To be able to gaze on your glory,
I know we have to pass through fire.
So I,  for my purgatory,
Choose your burning love,  my exiled soul
Would like to make and act of pure love,
And then,  flying away to Heaven,  its Homeland,
Enter straightaway into your Heart.

           --- St. Therese of Lisieux....Carmelite lover of Jesus

MANIFESTO: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

   - Wendell Berry

apocatastatic lyric

Certain Gestures Holding Pure Forms


Certain gestures holding pure forms
Profess the most feared demon of the corn.
Earthy spirits from a woman’s occasion;
One victim of the misfortune labor
Gives birth of Gods and justice born
To the chill of midwinter Christmas morn.
Come my saints and demons dear
Hear the jeering of the ass’ ear
For drama be where heaven lay its temporary
Judgment till that day when nothing
But the aspect of father and son’s evidence,
Warrants earth destruction for kingdom to come.
Take no Gods who will not dance,
Will not drag your heat through the streets
Then collect it in their hands to eat.
Come, let us arrive to that animal that we are;
Ashes of goodness and evil’s bones
Come, driven to church courtyard door where day
Break on night sharp edge and spill itself across earth’s head
And there let us praise with dance this light that
Gives more than even Gods have dreamed to comprehend.
     
                                                                      David E. Patton

as fate would have it

    Hay for the Horses





He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."



      -Gary Snyder











.....

silence as the compass rose

Displacement

measures

time

by shifting the

horizon-

line,

contexts

slide under

themselves, an

ultimate

camouflage of

emptiness

as hot & cool

layers of

air

hover

over the

shimmering pale

blue

mirage

of Las Vegas.


    -some guy named faville i believe

love sonnet XIII

"Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said,
    "and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever,
his remark which first explained the use of the lever
   was an academic joke. But if that dead

sage could return to life, he would find a clear
  demonstration of his idea, which is not
  pure theory after all.  That putative spot
        exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.

What could be more immovable or stronger?
What becomes more and more secure, the longer
       it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point
   from which to move a world that is out of joint,
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.

        -Jean de Sponde   (16th century)

 

            - David R. Slavitt  -  trans.

Families, the worst of them,

Families, the worst of them,
Are like a dog's vomit:
Magnetic.

Making sense
And not making sense
At precisely the same time,
But drawing you back.

Families, the best of them,
Are an architectural marvel:
Holding up the weight of the sky above
And fending off the ground below,
But with such grace
That the two kiss there on the horizon.

          wb picklesworth  (poet preacher)

some girls just have to sing

.....................







O most noble Greenness, rooted in the sun,
shining forth in streaming splendor upon the wheel of Earth.


No earthly sense or being can comprehend you.
You are encircled by the very arms of Divine mysteries.


You are radiant like the red of dawn!
You glow like the incandescence of the sun!

         


            

                               --Hildegard von Bingen  (1098-1179)


               
                                  trans.  Jerry Dybdal & Matthew Fox














.