Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Finding a truth teller these days is infinitely precious.

--Mary Oliver (2008)

Atlas

 

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

--U.A. Fanthorpe

[Photo of my Atlas...]

Wedding Thoughts: All I know about love

 

This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.

This is everything I've learned about marriage:  nothing.

Only that the world out there is complicated,

and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,

and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,

is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,

and not to be alone.

It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.

Somebody's got your back.

Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you

or send for the army to rescue them.

It's not two broken halves becoming one.

It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home

because home is wherever you are both together.

So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,

like a book without pages or a forest without trees.

Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.

Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.

Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours,

and it's a road you can only learn by walking it,

a dance you cannot be taught,

a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.

And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,

not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.

And your hands will meet, 
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.

And that's all I know about love.

--Neil Gaiman

The Life You Have

 

This may not be the day you planned,

may not even be the life you wanted--

but this is the one you have. So wrap

your hands around the warm mug of it,

inhaling the honeyed steam of tea. Pull

the wool sweater of it closer, and relish

whatever protects you against every gust

of cold rushing in. Savor the buttered

toast and creamy sweet potato soup

of it, kissed with a hint of cinnamon

and curry. Switch on the bright floodlight

of your life and watch flurries drift down

in the yard, like a handful of confetti

tossed out over the ragged snowbanks.

--James Crews

Hope

 

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
     it shakes sleep from its eyes
     and drops from mushroom gills,
          it explodes in the starry heads
          of dandelions turned sages,
               it sticks to the wings of green angels
               that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
     it lives in each earthworm segment
     surviving cruelty,
          it is the motion that runs
          from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
               it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
               of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

--Lisel Mueller

[Our grandchildren give us hope.]

Flicker

"What a small flicker is given

To each of us to know."  

--Naomi Shihab Nye

You go around all day guarding the flicker

you found again that morning. Cupping a hand

to protect it from wind, holding it close

to the chest, so no wayward breath blows it out.

This flame, shaky and uncertain, is how you

light the rooms behind your eyes that no one

has ever seen. The wick may be frayed,

and the wax will last for just an hour or two

at best, but it is enough. It will always be

enough to look into the eyes of another

and pass the flicker on to them.

--James Crews

Halleluiah

 

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

--Mary Oliver

[Visiting Tupelo, MS]