For Your Birthday

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
The blueprint of your life
Would begin to glow on earth,
Illuminating all the faces and voices
That would arrive to invite
Your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,
Who loved you before you were,
And trusted to call you here
With no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you
Into becoming who you were meant to be,
Blessed be those who have crossed your life
With dark gifts of hurt and loss
That have helped to school your mind
In the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,
Blessed be those who looked for you
And found you, their kind hands
Urgent to open a blue window
In the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
Your health, eyes to behold the world,
Thoughts to countenance the unknown,
Memory to harvest vanished days,
Your heart to feel the world's waves,
Your breath to breathe the nourishment
Of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,
May you open the gift of solitude
In order to receive your soul;
Enter the generosity of silence
To hear your hidden heart;
Know the serenity of stillness
To be enfolded anew
By the miracle of your being. 

--John O'Donohue

[Happy 3rd birthday to our favorite twins.]

How To Kill a Poem (A cautionary tale)

 I killed a nascent poem today;

it hopped upon my shoulder.
Cocked its head in a curious way;
became a little bolder.

I coaxed it to my open palm,
could feel its restless toes;
assured it that I meant no harm;
that’s how seduction grows.

What happened next is far from clear,
how things between us changed.
I pounced upon its innocence
and sought to rearrange

the placement of its feathers,
the brightness of its eyes.
The shape and substance of its song
I coldly criticized.

The urge to overmaster
I no longer could resist.
It tried to fly away from me;
I squeezed it in my fist.

The minutes passed.

My hand grew cold,
for it held only death.

(so)

I tossed it on the dead poem pile
where it may join the rest.

--Deborah Barchi

On the Other Side of the Door

On the other side of the door

I can be a different me,

As smart and as brave, as funny or strong

As a person could want to be.

There's nothing too hard for me to do,

There's no place I can't explore

Because everything can happen

On the other side of the door.

On the other side of the door

I don't have to go alone.

If you come, too, we can sail tall ships

And fly where the wind has flown.

And wherever we go, it is almost sure

We'll find what we are looking for

Because everything can happen

On the other side of the door.

--Jeff Moss

Photos taken in Dublin, Ireland

Tomorrow’s Child

What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks.
It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word.
It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way life is opening up creative events which will open the way to freedom and resurrection- but the two- suffering and hope.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté, and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we see.
That is the secret discipline.
It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints, the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hopes.

--Rubin Alves

Grace After Meals

We end this meal with grace

For the joy and nourishment of food,

The slowed time away from the world

To come into presence with each other

And sense the subtle lives behind our faces,

The different colors of our voices,

The edges of hungers we keep private,

The circle of love that unites us.

We pray the wise spirit who keeps us

To change the structures that make others hunger

And that after such grace we might now go forth

and impart dignity wherever we partake.

--John O'Donohue

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

Wistawa Szymborska

Drawings by Children

1

The sun may be visible or not
(it may be behind you,
the viewer of these pictures)
but the sky is always blue
if it is day.
If not,
the stars come almost within your grasp;
crooked, they reach out to you,
on the verge of falling.
It is never sunrise or sunset;
there is no bloody eye
spying on you across the horizon.
It is clearly day or night,
it is bright or totally dark,
it is here and never there.

2

In the beginning, you only needed
your head, a moon swimming in space,
and four bare branches;
and when your body was added,
it was light and thin at first,
not yet the dark chapel
from which, later, you tried to escape.
You lived in a non-Newtonian world,
your arms grew up from your shoulders,
your feet did not touch the ground,
your hair was streaming,
you were still flying.

3

The house is smaller than you remembered,
it has windows but no door.
A chimney sits on the gable roof,
a curl of smoke reassures you.
But the house has only two dimensions,
like a mash without its face;
the people who live there stand outside
as though time were always summer —
there is nothing behind the wall
except a space where the wind whistles,
but you cannot see that.

--Lisel Mueller

[Drawing by Thomas Johnson, Kindergarten]