Writings & poetry to inspire wonder, hope and whimsy
Kindness
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future 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 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 to 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 can 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 then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Untitled
By James Baldwin
Lord,
when you send the rain,
think about it, please,
a little?
Do
not get carried away
by the sound of falling water
the marvelous light
on the falling water.
I
am beneath that water.
It falls with great force
and the light
Blinds
me to the light.
The Theory and Practice of Rivers
By Jim Harrison
The rivers of my life:
moving looms of light,
anchored beneath the log
at night I can see the moon
moving up through the water
as shattered milk, the nudge
of fishes, belly and back
in turn grating against log
and bottom; letting go, the current
lifts me up and out
into the dark, gathering motion,
drifting into an eddy
with a sideways swirl,
the sandbar cooler than the air:
to speak it clearly,
how the water goes
is how the earth is shaped.
It is not so much that I got
there from here, which is everyone’s
story: but the shape
of the voyage, how it pushed outward
in every direction
until it stopped:
roots of plants and trees,
certain coral heads,
photos of splintered lightning,
blood vessels,
the shapes of creeks and rivers.
When I Met My Muse
By William Stafford
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.
It isn't that the soul is confused,
it is that it cannot find its place
to greeted hospitably, seated
beautifully, and to be at peace
and do its work.
So wandering has to do with
not that the person has nothing or
knows nothing, they actually know
and carry a great deal, great riches.
They just haven't found the ground,
the hospitable ground, to place them
and reveal all that they are.
—Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Love After Love
by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic.
True wildness is a love of nature, a delight
in silence, a voice free to say
spontaneous things, and an exuberant
curiosity in the face of the unknown.
—Robert Bly