It can be painful to be so open to the world (“You may have to break your heart”), but as Bass points out, it is more than worth it “to know even one moment alive.” What truly lifts us back into the flow is noticing each small thing that sparks our senses, whether it be “the sound of an oar,” “the smell of grated ginger,” or simply “warm socks.”
Invitation for Writing and Reflection
What seemingly small joys bring you back to that “sudden rush of the world” even in the midst of worry or fear? How does it feel when gratitude and hope reawaken the heart to what’s around you?
Mark Nepo
Language, Prayer, and Grace
Language is no more than the impressions
left by birds nesting in snow.
Prayer is the path opened
by a leopard leaping through the brush.
And grace is how the water parts for a fish
letting it break surface.
Jane Hirshfield
The Fish
There is a fish
that stitches
the inner water
and the outer water together.
Bastes them
with its gold body’s flowing.
A heavy thread
follows that transparent river,
secures it—
the broad world we make daily,
daily give ourselves to.
Neither imagined
nor unimagined,
neither winged nor finned,
we walk the luminous seam.
Knot it.
Flow back into the open gills.
Patricia Fargnoli
Reincarnate
I want to come back as that ordinary
garden snail, carting my brown-striped spiral shell
onto the mushroom which has sprouted
after overnight rain so I can stretch
my tentacles toward the slightly drooping
and pimpled raspberry, sweet and pulsing—
a thumb that bends on its stalk from the crown
of small leaves, weighed down by the almost
translucent shining drop of dew I have
been reaching and reaching toward my whole life.
Linda Hogan
Innocence
There is nothing more innocent
than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
neither of us knowing what it will become
in the abundance of the planet.
It makes a living only by remaining still
in its niche.
One day it may struggle out of its tender
pearl of blind skin
with a wing or with vision
leaving behind the transparent.
I cover it again, keep laboring,
hands in earth, myself a singular body.
Watching things grow,
wondering how
a cut blade of grass knows
how to turn sharp again at the end.
This same growing must be myself,
not aware yet of what I will become
in my own fullness
inside this simple flesh.
Farnaz Fatemi
Everything Is Made of Labor
The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Apple Blossoms
One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,
the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple
blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night
the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find
yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open
like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called
bumblebee stumbles in.
Nancy Miller Gomez
Growing Apples
There is big excitement in C block today.
On the window sill,
in a plastic ice cream cup
a little plant is growing.
This is all the men want to talk about:
how an apple seed germinated
in a crack of damp concrete;
how they tore open tea bags
to collect the leaves, leached them
in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed
made of Lipton. How this finger of spring
dug one delicate root down
into the dark fannings and now
two small sleeves of green
are pushing out from the emerging tip.
The men are tipsy with this miracle.
Each morning, one by one,
they go to the window and check
the progress of the struggling plant.
All through the day they return
to stand over the seedling
and whisper.
Danusha Laméris
Aspen
They tower above the hilltop,
yellow leaves rustling the air
in a kind of muffled conversation.
And when a breeze bends
their upper branches
they tilt sideways
in the gesture of attentive listeners.
And so, we sit together in silence,
old friends who don’t need to speak.
Though sometimes they murmur
amongst themselves,
the kind of banter that once
soothed me as a child
drifting off to sleep
while my parents carried on
upstairs, talking after dinner
with their guests.
Now, a red-winged blackbird
lands on a slender branch
and is lost among shuffling leaves.
Now, a cloud passes overhead—
my mother’s silk scarf
trailing on the wind.
Is this what it is to be alone?
This being with my tall,
branched sisters?
Then let me sit
in their lengthening shadow
as the day wanes,
and the hours of my life wane,
and the evening starts to fall,
and the night comes
with its quiet company of stars.
Margaret Hasse
With Trees
for Norton Stillman
Something I’ve forgotten calls me away
from the picnic table to tall trees
at the far end of the clearing.
I remember lying on grass
being still, studying forks of branches
with their thousands of leaves.
While trees accrued their secret rings
life spread a great canopy
of family, work, ordinary activity.
I mislaid what once moved me.
Today I have time to follow
the melody of green wherever it goes,
a tune, maybe hummed
when I was too young
to have the words I wanted
and know how a body returns
to familiar refrains.
Now like a child, I sit down, lie back,
look up at the crowns of maple,
needled spruce and a big-hearted boxwood.
Fugitive birds dart in and out.
In the least little wind, birch leaves turn
and flash silver like a school of minnows.
Clouds range in the blue
sky
above earth’s great geniuses
of shelter and shade.
Kim Stafford
Shelter in Place
Long before the pandemic, the trees
knew how to guard one place with
roots and shade. Moss found
how to hug a stone for life.
Every stream works out how
to move in place, staying home
even as it flows generously
outward, sending bounty far.
Now is our time to practice—
singing from balconies, sending
words of comfort by any courier,
kindling our lonesome generosity
to shine in all directions like stars.
Heather Newman
Missing Key
The doors are locked and I’m searching for a way in.
I circle my house intent on finding a crack in the system
I painstakingly created, a loose bolt, a faulty window.
It’s still light in Vermont but in one hour the sun will dip
behind the mountain, temperatures will fall, and I may still
be stuck outside, cursing. There are friends. There are neighbors.
Or I could resolve nothing, sit on the cool grass and wait.
On my iPhone, I view my furious attempts to break in
recorded on the outdoor cameras. There are family members
who hold a key, but rescues have never worked for me in the past.
I consider places for lost or hidden keys. They say gratitude is a key.
Solitude is a mountain. There are pines, cedars and hemlocks,
a range against the mango-magenta horizon,
a red-tailed hawk circling its prey.
Michael Kiesow Moore
Climbing the Golden Mountain
Silence is the golden mountain.
—Jack Kerouac
Listen. Turn
everything
off. When
the noise
of our lives
drifts away,
when the
chatter of
our minds
sinks into
that perfect
lake of nothing,
then, oh
then we can
apprehend
that golden
mountain,
always there,
waiting for
us to be
still enough
to hear it.
Laura Foley
To See It
We need to separate to see
the life we’ve made.
We need to leave our house
where someone waits for us, patiently,
warm beneath the sheets.
We need to don a sweater, a coat, mittens,
wrap a scarf around our neck,
stride down the road,
a cold winter morning,
and turn our head back,
to see it—perched
on the top of the hill, our life
lit from inside.
Jacqueline Jules
Unclouded Vision
Her lenses, implanted
to uncloud aging eyes,
sparkle now like a bit
of glitter on a card,
rhinestones on a T-shirt.
Twinkle in her eye. An old cliché.
Common long before
surgery was routine, suggesting
joy or affection—intangibles
that lift heels off concrete,
make us notice yellow petals
pushing through sidewalk cracks.
My grandmother
now visits museums again,
marvels at details, stops to read
each acrylic label on the wall.
Danusha Laméris
Improvement
The optometrist says my eyes
are getting better each year.
Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.
What’s next? The light step I had at six?
All the gray hairs back to brown?
Skin taut as a drum?
My improved eyes and I
walked around town and celebrated.
We took in the letters
of the marquee, the individual leaves
filling out the branches of the sycamore,
an early moon.
So much goes downhill: joints
wearing out with every mile,
the delicate folds of the eardrum
exhausted from years of listening.
I’m grateful for small victories.
The way the heart still beats time
in the cathedral of the ribs.
And the mind, watching its parade
of thoughts, enter and leave,
begins to see them for what they are:
jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats,
Reflective Pause
Grateful for Small Victories
In “Improvement,” Danusha Laméris recounts the rare experience of a part of her body actually getting better with age and invites us to celebrate the good news with her. “So much goes downhill,” she says, reminding us of the body’s fragility and vulnerability. Yet she also urges us to be “grateful for small victories,” for the fact that the heart carries on “in the cathedral of the ribs,” and that the endlessly busy mind keeps sending out its “parade of thoughts.” I love the way the speaker of this poem seems to detach from her own anxieties and intrusive thoughts, even playfully seeing them as “jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats” meant to entertain, and not to be obeyed. And in her question, “What’s next?,” I also hear the willingness to have hope that other things in her life, and in the world, might begin to improve as well.
Invitation for Writing and Reflection
Write your own celebration of your “small victories,” things you managed to accomplish no matter how slight they might seem. Whatever your list, try to capture that same sense of gratitude and joy for things that went well for you.
Jack Ridl
After Spending the Morning Baking Bread
Our cat lies across the stove’s front burners,
right leg hanging over the oven door. He
is looking into the pantry where his bowl
sits full on the counter. His smaller dish,
the one for his splash of cream, sits empty.
Say yes to wanting to be this cat. Say
yes to wanting to lie across the leftover
warmth, letting it rise into your soft belly,
spreading into every twitch of whisker, twist
of fur and cell, through the Mobius strip
of your bloodstream. You won’t know
you will die. You won’t know the mice
do not exist for you. If a lap is empty and
warm, you will land on it, feel an unsteady
hand along your back, fingers scratching
behind your ear. You will purr.
Wally Swist
Radiance
Over your gray and white oval marble-top kitchen table,
the meeting of our eyes makes the room grow brighter.
Our faces, layer after layer, become so vibrant
the light appears to crest in waves.
We have become changed by it, nothing can be
the same after it. When I bend down to touch
the shape of deer tracks in the damp sand, it is in
the same way I place my fingers over your body.
When I stand beside a freshet in a meadow
the sun catches the rings of the water’s long ripples
in the wind, that is the same glimmer we hold
when our eyes meet in the kitchen over
your gray and white oval marble-top table.
Every day for the rest of my life, yours is the face
I want to see when I awake in the morning.
Kristen Case
Morning
Against all probability our bulbs have blossomed,
opened their white rooms, given their assent.
I pull myself from your breathing to take a closer look.
It happened overnight.
Outside a flock of birds folds and unfolds its single body.
I start the coffee. Light comes
from impossible directions.
You are still asleep.
I cup the curve of your skull with my hand.
Alive, sleeping.
Light rises on the flame-colored bricks.
Ross Gay
Wedding Poem
for Keith and Jen
Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower
again and again
dangling upside down
by its tiny claws
steadying itself by snapping open
like an old-timey fan
its wings
again and again,
until, swooning, it tumbled off
and swooped back to the very same perch,
where the sunflower curled its giant
swirling of seeds
around the bird and leaned back
to admire the soft wind
nudging the bird’s plumage,
and friends I could see
the points on the flower’s stately crown
soften and curl inward
as it almost indiscernibly lifted
the food of its body
to the bird’s nuzzling mouth
whose fervor
I could hear from
oh 20 or 30 feet away
and see from the tiny hulls
that sailed from their
good racket,
which good racket, I have to say
was making me blush,
and rock up on my tippy-toes,
and just barely purse my lips
with what I realize now
was being, simply, glad,
which such love,
if we let it,
makes us feel.