1091. I Go From The Woods - Wendell Berry

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I go from the woods into the cleared fields:

A place no human made, a place unmade

By human greed, and to be made again.

Where centuries of leaves once built by dying

A deathless potency of light and stone

And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless

Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain.

The growth of fifty thousand years undone

In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock

And clay - a ‘new land’ , truly, that no race

Was ever native to, but hungry mice

And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns

And thistles sent by generosity

Of new beginning. No Eden, this was

A garden once, a good and perfect gift;

Its possible abundance stood in it

As it then stood. But now what it might be

Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives -

Thousands of years to make it what it was,

Beginning now, in our few troubled days.

1090. Landscape With Figures - Frank Ormsby

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What haunts me is a farmhouse among trees

Seen from a bus window, a girl

With a a suitcase climbing a long hill

And a woman waiting.

The time the bus took to reach and pass

The lane’s entrance nothing was settled,

The girl still climbing and the woman still

On the long hill’s summit.

Men were not present. Neither in the fields

That sloped from hedges, nor beyond the wall

That marked the yard’s limits

Was there sign of hens, or hands working.

No sight that might have softened

On the eye the scene’s

Relentlessness.

Nothing had happened, yet the minute spoke

And the scene spoke and the silence,

And oppressed as air does, Loading

For a storm’s release.

All lanes and houses

Secretive in trees and gaunt hills’ jawlines

Turn my thoughts again

To that day’s journey and the thing I saw

And could not fathom. Struck with the same dread

I seem to share in sense, not detail,

What was heavy there:

Sadness of dim places, obscure lives,

Ends and beginnings,

Such extremities.

1089. Gorgon - Tony Hoagland

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Now that you need your prescription glasses to see the stars

and now that the telemarketers know your preference to sexual positions

Now that corporations run the government

and move over land like giant cloud formations

Now that the human family has turned out to be a conspiracy against the planet

Now that it’s hard to cast stones

without hitting a cell phone tower that will show up later on your bill

Now that you know you are neither innocent, nor powerful,

not a character in a book;

You have arrived at the edge of the world

where the information wind howls incessantly

and you stand in your armor made of irony

with your sword of good intentions raised—

The world is a Gorgon.

It holds up its thousand ugly heads with their thousand writhing visages

Death or madness to look at too long

but your job is not to conquer it;

not to provide entertaining repartee,

not to revile yourself in shame.

Your job is to stay calm

Your job is to watch and take notes

To go on looking

Your job is to not be turned into stone.

1088. Spring-Watching - Hô Xuân Hong (1775- 1820)

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Translated by John Balaban

A gentle spring evening arrives

airily, unclouded by worldly dust. 

Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.

We see heaven upside down in sad puddles.

Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.

And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is Nirvana?

Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.