Sleeping and Waking

1.
All night someone is trying to tell you something.
The voice is a harbor, pulling you from underneath.

Where am I, you say, what’s this and who are you?

The voice washes you up on the shore of your life.
You never knew there was land here.

2.
In the morning you are wakened by gulls.
Flapping at the window, they want you to feed them.
Your eyes blink, your own hands are pulling you back.

All day you break bread into small pieces,
become the tide covering your straight clear tracks.

 

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

 

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you nust lose things,
feel the furture dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

 

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
And disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
And now live over a quarry of noise and dust
Cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
It too could wake up filled with possibilities
Of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
And love even the floor which needs to be swept,
The soiled linens and scratched records….
Since there is no place large enough
To contain so much happiness,
You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
Into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
For the moon, but continues to hold it, and to share it,
And in that way, be known.

 

What Have You Lost - an anthology
poems selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

The following poems are selected from this anthology which deals
with loss in all its shapes and forms. A very worthy read.

Barbara McCauley
The Wren

he was small not ready yet
frantic
under the hedge
I caught him took him home
my father wasn’t sure
wild birds he said
we’ve tried so many times
but he ate
what we made for him
and in three days
could fly
around the living room
it’s time my father said
you have to let him go

outside
he sat on my shoulder
I shook him off he flew
to a branch of the maple
perched there
silent
his little eyes
I was a child I called him
back he came
stood for a moment
on my finger
then gone
I felt the spring of his legs
all day

 

William Stafford
Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People wont even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

 

Rosellen Brown

What are friends for, my mother asks.
A duty undone, visit missed,
casserole unbaked for sick Jane.
Someone has just made her bitter.

Nothing. They are for nothing, friends,
I think. All they do in the end—
they touch you. they fill you like music.

 

Linda Allardt
Seeing For You

The leaves left at the tops of trees
sound like rain in the wind. November—
the sparrows play at being leaves,
the leaves at being birds.
I play at seeing for you
now that you play at being gone.

Leonard Nathan
Kind

I hadn’t noticed
till a death took me outside
and left me there
that grass lifts so quietly
to catch everything
we drop and we drop
everything

~