Today I share three poems: two are about journeys, all three about the convolutions and tenderness of hope. Two by remarkable, internationally known poets, and one funny little musing penned this week by yours truly...a pigtail of an ending.
The Journey
Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again
painting their black silhouettes on an open sky.
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens
so you can find the one line already written inside you.
Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that
first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart.
Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out
someone has written something new in the ashes
of your life.
You are not leaving. Even as the light
fades quickly now, you are arriving.
David Whyte
House of Belonging and River Flow
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell
Three Books
In a Class by Themselves
Picture the Ark, if you would—
birds,
reptiles,
mammals.
That’s all we usually see.
No lobsters, eels, sardines.
They could all swim.
There were spiders, of course,
taking up residence
in darker corners of the hold.
Have you thought about the insects?
Or did they invite themselves?
Flies on an elephant,
fleas on a squirrel.
A few termites maybe?
Two by two?
Or hidden swarms?
And who was the first off the Ark,
as a watery sun
offered strange filaments of light?
I bet it wasn’t the dove.
Dawn Elizabeth Hunt
Until next time.
Dawn
Photo credits:
Mountain light, Luke Richardson, unSplash
Piggies, Stefanie Poepken, unSplash
Flying wonder, Thomas Giotopoulos, unSplash