Like a tree

To live! Like a tree alone and free
Like a forest in brotherhood
THIS YEARNING IS OURS.

Nazim Hikmet
(1902-1963)

Tit for Tat

I often pass a gracious tree
Whose name I can't identify,
But still I bow, in courtesy
It waves a bough, in kind reply.

I do not know your name, O tree
(Are you a hemlock or a pine?)
But why should that embarrass me?
Quite probably you don't know mine.

-- Christopher Morley

With rue my heart is laden

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfood lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

by Alfred Edward Housman

The Detail

The Detail

A speck of blue has more
intensity than all the sky;
I feel that there lives, a flower
of happy ecstasy, my longing.

A wind of spirits, passes
so far, from my window
sending a breeze that shatters
the flesh of an angelic awakening.

Alfonso Cortés

A Summer Love Poem

A Summer Love Poem

Clouds float by on a summer sky
I hop scotch over to you

Rainbows arch from ground to gold
I climb over to you

Thunder grumbles, lightning tumbles
And I bounce over to you

Sun beams back and catches me
Smiling over at you

Written by Nikki Giovanni

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.

-- Emily Dickinson

For this we were created

Christmas Poem

For this we were created:
To recall and be recalled
To weep and to cause to weep
To bury our dead --
Therefore our long arms for farewells
Hands to gather what was given
Fingers to dig in the earth.

So this will be our life;
Always an afternoon to forget,
A star ending in darkness
A roadway between two tombs --
Therefore we need to watch,
To speak low, to tread softly, to see
Night sleeping in silence.

There is not much to say:
A song about a cradle
A verse, perhaps of love
A prayer for one going away --
But do not forget this hour
And by it may our hearts
Be left, sober and innocent.

Then for this we were created:
For hope in the miracle
For sharing in poetry
For seeing the face of death --
Suddenly no more shall we wait...
Today the night is young; from death
We are scarely born, immensely.

Vinicius de Moraes, Translated by Ashley Brown

The Mind of Love

The Mind of Love

Today I love the world.
Last week it was a vile place,
broken, beyond repair.
And my mind reached out
in all directions
like a spiders spindly legs
to mend and weave
and fill the empty spaces,
until falling, exhausted
dangling by a single thread,
discouraged and utterly humiliated
that I couldn’t mend the fissures,
that I ever thought I could.

Today I love the world,
the faces on the street
the wind and chill.
Pausing to look up through
dark bare branches,
reaching out in all directions
against the vast bright blue.

Soon buds and leaves
will fill the empty spaces.
In the mind of this love
The fissures mend themselves.

** Excerpts of *A Heart as Wide as the World: Living with Mindfulness,
Wisdom, and Compassion*, by Sharon Salzberg