1010. Good Bones - Maggie Smith

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways
in a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways,
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

1009. And - Shuntarō Tanikawa

Translated from the Japanese by William I Elliott and Kazuo Kawamure

When summer comes
the cicadas
sing again.
Fireworks
freeze
in my memory.
Distant countries are dim
but the universe
is right in front of your nose.
What a blessing 
that people
can die
leaving behind
only the conjunction
"and".

1008. What Is Lost - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler

I wonder whee my life is, the one that could
have been and never was, the daring one
or the one of gloomy dread, that other thing
which could as well have been the sword or shield
but never was? I wonder where is my lost
Persian or Norwegian ancestor,
where is the chance of my not being blind,
where is the anchor, the ocean, where the forgetting
to be who I am? I wonder where the pure
night is that the unlettered working day
entrusts to the rough laborer so that he
can also feel the love of literature
I also think about a certain mate
who waited for me once, perhaps still waits.

1007. First Sight - Philip Larkin

.

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow.

1006. And Now You - Kate Miller

From The Observances, Kate Miller’s debut collection Carcanet, 2015.

And now you

exist

outside the royal room of blood you occupied

and – without being shown –

can close a fist or yawn.

Practised, you look

already. Hopskip and bowing,

treading measure in a dance.

You only took to unfamiliar air

with your first taste of dust

yesterday as evening fell. All the falling,

all the flow around you,

hair and water, will become familiar:

mother, father: skin-to-skin.

You’ve swum the sea of welcome,

been lifted on the swell,

slipped waxy through the crowd of hands.

Your own breath sounded

the all-clear,

all’s well,

when you sang out a first

exclamatory note

about the cord that tied you

being cut,

the tying-off, your separate knot.

1005. Italy to Lord - Jane Draycott

(From:  The Occupant)

It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica,
sixteen oak trees in a London living room,

the little girl, my mother, in the bookcase glass.

Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail,

turning, HMS Discovery – none of the rivers
of southern Italy is of any great importance.

Like birds on a long-haul flight, let not seas

or deserts, cliffs or icy mountain-tops

impede you. Jews, Kabȋr, Kabul, Kaffir,

from up here all seems clear (all evil in the world’s
ascribed to Maya or illusion), then home at last

returned from all those navigable miles

to Lichen, Linnet, Logic, London, to find

a century has passed, the forest’s cleared,

the animals all bared and scorched, the gold

all brought to light. I look into the glass,

discover there myself in dense shade, deep

and shadowy as on any wooded island.

1004. Labyrinth - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler

There’ll never be a door. You are inside

and the fortress contains the universe

and has no other side nor any back

nor any outer wall nor secret core.

Do not expect the rigor of your path,

which stubbornly splits into another one,

which stubbornly splits into another one,

to have an end. Your fate is ironclad

like your judge. Do not expect the charge

of the bull that is a man and whose strange

plural form fills the thicket of endless

interwoven stone with your own horror.

It does not exist. Expect nothing. Not

even the beast obscured by the black dusk.

1003. The Lake of Memories - Robert Altmann

.

Voices sit

like broken chairs

in a room.

A room stands

for the ceremony

of impermanence.

Impermanence cracks

the façade

of self.

The self builds

its walls

of healing.

Healing frames

the house

of wounds.

Wounds bridge

darkness and light

over time.

Time winds through

the lake of memories

in frozen tongue.

1002. Meeting Point - Louis MacNeice

(?)

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else,

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream’s music did not stop,

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise –

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body’s peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room a glow because

Time was away and she was here.

1001. The Dog Itself - Helen Farish

.

Memory rounds this up, breathless,

like the dog herding sheep

below the bedroom window:

dropped at my feet are smells –

wool in the rain, my aunt’s

cigarette smoked on the hoof,

gorse also, firs making green

(and what it all means,

that too has a smell).

Not forgetting the dog itself,

so pleased with its work,

I must pen it in quick.

1,000 !!!!! Burning the Old Year - Naomi Shihab Nye

.

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I did’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.

999. The Good Shepherd - Stanley Moss

.

Because he would not abandon the flock for a lost sheep

after the others had bedded down for the night,

he turned back, searched the thickets and gullies.

Sleepless, while the flock dozed in the morning mist

he searched the pastures up ahead. Winter nearing,

our wool heavy with brambles, ropes of muddy ice,

he did not abandon the lost sheep, even when the snows came.

Still, I knew there was only a thin line

between the good shepherd and the butcher.

How many lambs had put their heads between the shepherd’s knees,

closed their eyes, offering their neck to the knife?

Familiar – the quick thuds of the club doing its work.

More than once at night I saw the halo coming.

I ran like a deer and hid among rocks,

or I crawled under a bush, my heart in thorns.

During the day I lived my life in clover

watching out for the halo.

I swore on the day the good shepherd catches hold,

trying to wrestle me to the ground and bind my feet,

I will buck like a ram and bite like a wolf,

although I taste the famous blood

I will break loose! I will race under the gates of heaven,

back to the mortal fields, my flock, my stubbled grass and mud.

998. Compass - Jorge Luis Borges

  Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reed

Every single thing becomes a word

in a language that Someone or Something, night and day,

writes down in a never-ending scribble,

which is the history of the world, embracing

Rome, Carthage, you, me, everyone,

my life, which I do not understand, this anguish

of being enigma, accident, and puzzle,

and all the discordant languages of Babel.

Behind each name lies that which has no name.

Today I felt its nameless shadow tremble

in the blue clarity of the compass needle,

whose rule extends as far as the far seas,

something like a clock glimpsed in a dream

or a bird that stirs suddenly in its sleep.

997. Hojoki - Kennith Rexroth

Hojoki by Kennith Rexroth

A thing unknown for years, 

Rain falls heavily in June, 

On the ripe cherries, and on 

The half cut hay. 

Above the glittering 

Grey water of the inlet, 

In the driving, light filled mist, 

A blue heron 

Catches mice in the green 

And copper and citron swathes. 

I walk on the rainy hills. 

It is enough.

996. The Real World - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by S. Barańczak and C. Cavanagh

The real world doesn’t take flight

the way dreams do.

No muffled voice, no doorbell

can dispel it,

no shriek, no crash

can cut it short.

Images in dreams

are hazy and ambiguous,

and can generally be explained

in many different ways.

Reality means reality:

that’s a tougher nut to crack.

Dreams have keys.

The real world opens on its own

and can’t be shut.

Report cards and stars

pour from it,

butterflies and flatiron warmers

shower down,

headless caps

and shards of clouds.

Together they form a rebus

that can’t be solved.

Without us dreams couldn’t exist.

The one on whom the real world depends

is still unknown,

and the products of his insomnia

are available to anyone

who wakes up.

Dreams aren’t crazy—

it’s the real world that’s insane,

if only in the stubbornness

with which it sticks

to the current of events.

It dreams our recently deceased

are still alive,

in perfect health, no less,

and restored to the full bloom of youth.

The real world lays the corpse

in front of us.

The real world doesn’t blink an eye.

Dreams are featherweights,

and memory can shake them off with ease.

The real world doesn’t have to fear forgetfulness.

It’s a tough customer.

It sits on our shoulders,

weighs on our hearts,

tumbles to our feet.

There’s no escaping it,

it tags along each time we flee.

And there’s no stop

along our escape route

where reality isn’t expecting us.

995. Villanelle For Our Time - Frank Scott

.

From bitter searching of the heart,

Quickened with passion and with pain

We rise to play a greater part.

This is the faith from which we start:

Men shall know commonwealth again

From bitter searching of the heart.

We loved the easy and the smart,

But now, with keener hand and brain,

We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart

And neither race nor creed remain

From bitter searching of the heart.

Not steering by the venal chart

That tricked the mass for private gain,

We rise to play a greater part.

Reshaping narrow law and art

Whose symbols are the millions slain,

From bitter searching of the heart

We rise to play a greater part.

994. For The Living - Stephen Meadows

.

Standing high on this hillside

the wind off the Pacific

forming the language of grasses

and escarpment eternally speaking

the sea birds far out

on their planes of air

gather and squander

what the short days encompass

We make what we can

of what reason can give us

we take from these all too brief moments

some reckoning of meaning

hoping as we hurtle haphazard

through this storm of a cosmos

to make some small imprint

while the birds in their white realm

reeling over the tumbling green ocean

this plated earth gliding

beneath us like a wind

under shoulders

and the language we hear

in the grass on this hillside

is all of it mythic and wondrous

as the Goddesses dream

993. Andree Rexroth by Kenneth Rexroth

Mt. Tamalpais

The years have gone. It is spring

Again. Mars and Saturn will

Soon come on, low in the West,

In the dusk. Now the evening

Sunlight makes hazy girders

Over Steep Ravine above 

The waterfalls. The winter

Birds from Oregon, robins

And varied thrushes, feast on

Ripe toyon and madrone

Berries. The robins sing as

The dense light falls,

Your Ashes

Were scattered in this place. Here

I wrote you a farewell poem,

And long ago another,

A poem of peace and love,

Of the lassitude of a long

Spring evening in youth. Now

It is almost ten years since

You came here to stay. Once more,

The pussy willows that come

After the New Year in this

Outlandish land are blooming.

There are deer and raccoon tracks

In the same places. A few

New sand bars and cobble beds

Have been left where erosion

Has gnawed deep into the hills.

The rounds of life are narrow.

War and peace have past like ghosts.

The human race sinks towards

Oblivion. A bittern

Calls from the same rushes where

You heard one on our first year

In the West; and where I heard

One again in the year

Of your death.

992. Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain - Li Po

.

The birds have vanished down the sky,

Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

991. Eagle Poem - Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo - Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you , see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we 

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.