Kyrie

At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.

It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

-- Tomas Tranströmer

Life is work

"Goddamn it," he said,
cursing again, though he knew
she hated it,

"we have to go on, don't you see that?"

His eyes were huge, apoplectic,
his face flushed.

"Life goes on, and what does life mean?
Life means work, Marantha, work.
And work is what I intend to do."

-- T.C. Boyle, San Miguel
(arranged quote)

Out upon the earth

She was out of doors,
only that,
and it came to her
that it was the first time
she'd been out
in days.

The house loomed at her back,
but she never turned her head.

She was watching her feet, concentrating
on keeping her balance
in the roiling sepia
mud that clung to the
toes of her boots and
sucked at her heels.

The rain drummed
at the parasol.

Everything smelled
of fresh-turned earth.

-- T.C. Boyle, San Miguel
(arranged quote)

Reel

Time
is but the stream
I go a-fishing in.

Its thin current
slides away, but
eternity remains.

– Henry David Thoreau
(arranged quote)

Different Stripes

The consciousness of difference
in a child
may be very painful;

for, having done nothing
yet, and
being incapable
of doing anything,

the young person
cannot justify
that difference.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

Success

Success
is the ability to go
from one failure to another

with no loss of enthusiasm.

--Anonymous
(arranged quote)
(often misattributed to Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln)
(http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/28/success/)

Know your Enemy

The greatest enemy
of knowledge
is not ignorance,

it is the illusion
of knowledge.

—Daniel J. Boorstin (The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself)
(arranged quote)
(often misattributed to Stephen Hawking)

Learning is the only thing for you

You may
grow old and trembling
in your anatomies,

you may
lie awake at night listening
to the disorder of your veins,

you may
miss your only love,

you may
see the world about you devastated
by evil lunatics,

or know
your honour trampled
in the sewers of baser minds.

There is
only one thing for it then
 — to learn.

Learn why
the world wags and
what wags it.

That is
the only thing
which the mind
can never exhaust,

never alienate,
never be tortured by,
never fear or distrust, and
never dream of regretting.

Learning is
the only thing for you.

Look
what a lot of things there are
to learn.

--T.H. White
(arranged quote)

What you need

Nothing's wrong with pleasure,
or wanting it.

Only,
if it is not
what you need,

and you take it,
take what it is you don't need,

you will never
get to what it is
you do need.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

The Kungle Jing

"Oh I am the Jing of the Kungle,"
Runny roared to one and all
When he wore his cion's lostume
To the walloheen bostume call.
But there he meat a leal rion
Who said, "You'd best cake tare,
And do not start believin'
You're the costume that you wear."

-- shel silverstein, from Runny Babbit

Hummingbird

We leave while your chest is still rising, to watch
for signs in the canyon of the journey you are taking alone,
without us, beyond our touch at your bedside, beyond the
windows of your flowered room.

The river carves its course through desert rock,
the kind that you, from green country, found haunting.
But it was here that we last came with you,
and here you may be waiting.

High above us, water falls in pounding roars,
each ripple, each wave, appearing only to disappear,
churning mists that soothe our burning eyes and
haze the pain of memory.

You once said “time marches on” to comfort us,
but in this place of endless time we see only the
blur of moving water, the mystery of quiet stone.
Until the moist air flickers:

A glimmer, green and golden, follows the river’s edge
and hovers close, a tiny whisper echos up the walls, and we
hear the requiem we have come for: your last breath,
in the wings of a hummingbird.

--Barbara Hood
Winner of 2014 ADN/UAA Writing Contest
Public Poetry Category

Existence

I want movement, 

not a calm course of existence. 

I want excitement 

and danger and the chance to sacrifice 

myself for my love. 

I feel in myself a superabundance 

of energy which finds no outlet

in our quiet life.

― Leo Tolstoy
(arranged quote)

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled-
I'm wading along

in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

- Mary Oliver

Best to remember

The only time
most people feel
alive
is when they're
suffering,

when something
overwhelms their ordinary,
careful armour,
and the naked child
is flung out
onto the world.

That's why
the things that are
worst to undergo
are best to remember.

-- Ted Hughes
(letter to his son, Nicholas, 1986)
(contained in Letters of Ted Hughes)
(arranged quote)

Hold On

There are times
in life
when people must know
when
not to let go.

Balloons
are designed
to teach
small children
this.

– Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
(arranged quote)

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning

--W.S. Merwin

Truth Seekers

The presence

of those seeking the truth is

infinitely to be preferred to

the presence

of those who think they've found it.


– Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

Flux

You shall not go down twice
to the same river, nor can you
go home again.

What is most changeable
is shown to be 
   fullest of eternity,
and your relationship to the river,
and the river's relationship to you 
   and to itself,
turns out to be at once more complex 
   and more reassuring 
than a mere lack of identity.

You can go home again,
so long as you understand
that home is a place
where you have never been.

-- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
(who was paraphrasing Heraclitus)
(edited, arranged quote)

Enter Within

The clearest way
into
the Universe
is
through a
forest wilderness.

-- John Muir,
John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
(1938) | page 313
(arranged quote)