1028. For The Traveler - John O'Donohue

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Every time you leave home,

another road takes you

into a world you were never in.

New strangers on other paths await.

new places that have never seen you

will startle a little at your entry.

Old places that you know well

will pretend nothing

changed since your last visit.

When you travel, you find yourself

alone in a different way,

more attentive now

to the self you bring along,

Your more subtle eye watching

you abroad; and how what meets you

touches that part of the heart

that lies low at home:

How you unexpectedly attune

to the timbre in some voice,

opening a conversation

you want to take in

to where your longing

has pressed hard enough

inward, on some unsaid dark,

to create a crystal of insight

you could not have known

you needed 

to illuminate 

your way.

When you travel,

a new silence

goes with you,

and if you listen,

you will hear

what your heart would

love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:

make sure, before you go,

to take the time

to bless your going forth,

to free your heart of ballast

so that the compass of your soul

might direct you toward

the territories of spirit

where you will discover

more of your hidden life,

and the urgencies

that deserve to claim you.

May you travel 

in an awakened way,

gathered wisely 

into your inner ground; 

that you may not waste 

the invitations which 

wait along the way 

to transform you.

May you travel safely, 

arrive refreshed, 

and live your time away 

to its fullest; 

return home more enriched, 

and free to balance 

the gift of days 

which call you. 

From: To Bless the Space Between Us

1027. Song For The First People - David Wagoner

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When you learned that men were coming, you changed into rocks.

Into fish and birds, into flowers and rivers in despair of us.

The tree under which I bend may be you,

That stone by the fire, the nighthawk swooping

And crying out over the swamp reeds, the reeds themselves.

Have I held you too lightly all my mornings?

I have broken your silence, dipped you up

Carelessly in by hands and drunk you, burnt you,

Carved you, slit your calm throat and danced on your skin,

Made charms of your bones. You have endured

All of it, suffering my foolishness

As the old wait quietly among clumsy children.

Now others are coming, neither like you nor like men.

I must change, First People. How do I change myself?

If no one can teach me the long will of the cedar,

Let me become Water Dog, Bitteroot, or Shut Beak.

Change me. Forgive me. I will learn to crawl, stand, or fly

Anyshere among you, forever, as though among great elders.

1026. Photograph - Cynthia Rylant

From: Something Permanent 

Photo by Walker Evans

He washed his feet for the picture,

even his knees,

and wondered about that man

who cared enough to want him to sit there

for a photograph

even though he didn’t have

nothing good to hold in his hands,

nor even a dog to sit by his chair.

It gave him, briefly,

some sort of feeling

of just being

enough.

1025. The Old Poets of China - Mary Oliver

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.

It offers me its busyness. It does not believe

that I do not want it. Now I understand

why the old poets of China went so far and high

into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

1024. A Small Eternity - Robert Penn Warren

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The time comes when you count the names—whether

dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether

In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted.

You count the names to reconstruct yourself.

But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare

At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air,

Will stare at you with a boyish smile—but, not

Stone-moored, blows away like dandelion fuzz.

It is very disturbing. It is as though you were

The idiot boy who ventures out on pond-ice

Too thin and hears here—hears there—the creak

And crackling spread. That is the sound Reality

Makes as it gives beneath your metaphysical

Poundage. Memory dies. Or lies. Time

Is a wind that never shifts air. Pray only

That, in the midst of selfishness, some

Small act of careless kindness, half-unconscious, some

Unwitting smile or brush of lips, may glow

In some other mind’s dark that’s lost your name, but stumbles

Upon that momentary Eternity.

1023. A Cup Of Coffee - Gene Fowler

From: A Solo In Tom-Toms - Gene Fowler

Such a small and homely and peasant-like thing

seems a cup of coffee.

Still, some of us know that nothing really is small

and nothing actually large, but of an entity,

and of no dimensions whatsoever except as our

imaginations make it seem large or small.

For everything is one thing and of one thing.

And the thing is not a thing at all, but an idea.

Perhaps this idea is both the creator and the created, 

Timeless, endless, and inscrutable.

1022. Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

my ancestors surround me

like walls of a canyon

quiet

stone hard

their ideas drift over me

like breezes at sunset

we gather sticks

and make settlements

what we do is only partly

our own

and partly continuation

down through the chromosomes

my son

my baby sleeps behind me

stirring in the night

for the touch

that lets him continue

he is arranging 

in his small form the furniture

and windows of his home

it will be a lot like mine

it will be a lot like theirs

1021. To The Son - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

It was not I who begot you. It was the dead—

my father, and his father, and their forebears,

all those who through a labyrinth of loves

descend from Adam and the desert wastes

of Cain and Abel, in a dawn so ancient

it has become mythology by now,

to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day

in the future, in which I now beget you.

I feed their multitudes. They are who we are,

and you among us, you and the the sons to come

that you will beget. The latest in the line

and in red Adam’s line. I too am those others.

Eternity is present in the things

of time and its impatient happenings

1020. The Bed by the Window - Robinson Jeffers

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I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed

When we built the house, it is ready waiting.

Unused unless by some guest in a a twelvemonth, who hardly  suspects

Its later purpose. I often regard it,

With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equaled

That they kill each other and a crystalline interest

Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish,

And then it will sound rather like music

When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky

Thrumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come,  Jeffers