"Earth's crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who see takes off his shoes."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

lil miss summer by Noomie Doodles

Wisdom

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O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

T. S. Eliot

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made:

Our times are in His hand

Who saith "A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''

Robert Browning

 Claudia Drossert 

shhhhhhh….
there is no hurry,
no thing to be done
no event that was ever
out of order.

You weave this world
like needle and thread,
every action
a divine rhythm

you need not know the rhyme
or reason,

they reveal themselves to you
soon enough.

Take your hands from the reigns
and wade in cool water,

for I am the driver in this
caravan of the heart.

Don’t you know
that nothing was ever required of you?
Do you not yet know
that all of it’s done?

Do not try to understand this.

Just listen to the genius of your
still-point breath.

Bask in the hollow
of this
magnificent strange.

Untie all your knots
and slide into
the river

for it’s here you are
born —

again and again

beguiled, bewildered,
beloved.

{Sunni Chapman}

Learning Letters

Spelling (Margaret Atwood)

My daughter plays on the floor

with plastic letters,

read, blue, & hard yellow.

learning how to spell,

spelling,

how to make spells.

*

and I wonder how many women

denied themselves daughters,

closed themselves in rooms,

drew the curtains

so they could mainline words.

*

A child is not a poem,

A poem is not a child.

There is no either/or.

However.

*

I return to the story

of a woman caught in the war

& in labor, her thighs tied

together by the enemy

so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,

her mouth covered by leather

to strangle words.

A word after a word

after a word is power.

*

At the point where language falls away

from the hot bones, at the point

where the rock breaks open and darkness

flows out of it like blood, at

the melting point of granite

when the bones know

they are hollow & the word

splits & doubles & speaks

the truth & the body

itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

*

How do you learn to spell?

Blood, sky, & the sun,

your own name first,

your first naming, your first name,

your first word.

With Snacks

From justcallmechris.blogspot.com

With Sand

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With Sheet Protector 

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With Rocks

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The Great Affair

The great affair, the love affair with life,

is to live as variously as possible,

to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,

climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.

Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding,

and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours,

life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,

but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

- Diane Ackermann

{Print: http://nordicbliss.co.uk/product.php?id_product=112 via blissbblog.com}

Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

The Turning

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
~W.H. Auden

Shu Ting

When you pass by my window, Bless me, please, For the light is still on.

The light is on— In the gloomy night, Like a floating fisherman's lamp. You can imagine my little cabin, Like a little boat tossing in a windstorm But I did not sink, For the light is still on.

The light is on— My shadow on the curtain Is that of a stooped old man, No vigorous gestures, My back bent even more than before. But my heart has not grown old, For the light is still on.

The light is on— With a burning love, It acknowledges greetings from all sides. The light is on— With dignity and pride, It looks down at oppressions of all kinds. Ah, when did it take on a distinct character? Since you began to understand me.

For the light is still on— Bless me, please, When you pass by my window.

Image by Naira Oganesyan

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn

(introduced to me from here)

True Story by Gary Soto

In Berkeley, I walked in gloom,

As if I had eaten a bowl of ashes, with ash milk,
With a spoonful of sugary ash.
I walked until my body began to crumble,
And a Volkswagen beetle, a ragtop,
Chugged up the hill, also made of ash,
With daffodils in these homely yards of ash...

Like a prophet, the driver had long hair and a beard,
And his companion in the passenger seat
Was a dog eating an apple, turning it over in its teeth
To get all sides, the entire world of sweetness.
When the dog viewed me from the corners
Of his eyes, I couldn't help but touch my heart.
I was grateful that I lived in his consciousness,
Even these brief seconds, which, in dog time,
Is something like twenty minutes in human time.
The blink of his eyelashes blew away the ashes,
Blew away my gloom.

The Volkswagen popped black exhaust,
Rattled up the street. In my happiness,
I went home and lay on the couch, hands behind my head.
I ate an apple, rotating it to get all sides
By juggling it in my teeth,
And thought, yes, this is a dog's life devoured
To its core and three seeds.

To the Foot from its Child

The child's foot is not yet aware it's a foot
and would like to be a butterfly or an apple.

But in time, stones and bits of glass,
streets, ladders,
and the paths in the rough earth
go on teaching the foot that it cannot fly,
cannot be a fruit bulging on the branch.
Then, the child's foot
is defeated, falls
in the battle,
is a prisoner
condemned to live in a shoe.

Bit by bit, in that dark,
it grows to know the world in its own way,
out of touch with its fellow, enclosed,
feeling out life like a blink man.

These soft nails
of quartz, bunched together,
grow hard, and change themselves
into opaque substance, hard as horn,
and the tiny, petaled toes of the child
grow bunched and out of trim,
take on the form of eyeless reptiles
with triangular heads, like worms.
Later, they grow calloused
and are covered
with the faint volcanoes of death,
a coarsening hard to accept.

But this blind thing walks
without respite, never stopping
for hour after hour,
the one foot, the other,
now the man's,
now the woman's,
up above,
down below,
through fields, mines,
markets and ministries,
backwards,
far afield, inward,
forward,
this foot toils in its shoe,
scarcely taking time
to bare itself in love or sleep;
it walks, they walk,
until the whole man chooses to stop.

And then it descended
underground, unaware,
for there, everything, everything was dark.
It never knew it had ceased to be a foot
or if they were burying it so that it could fly
or so it could become
an apple.

by Pablo Neruda