Qasida of the Dark Doves

 

.

Through the laurel’s branches 
I saw two dark doves.
One was the sun,
the other the moon.

Little neighbors, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.

And I who was walking
with the earth at my waist
saw two snowy eagles
and a naked girl.

The one was the other
and the girl was neither.

Little eagles, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.

Through the laurel’s branches
I saw two naked doves.
The one was the other
and both of them neither.


—Federico García Lorca
Catherine Brown version

.

we are occasional like that

 

.

We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.


—Jack Gilbert
Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played

.

a song with no end

.

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"
I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.


—Charles Bukowski

.

In Rain, excerpt

 

.

3.

In a mist of light
falling with the rain
I walk this ground
of which dead men
and women I have loved
are part, as they
are part of me. In earth,
in blood, in mind,
the dead and living
into each other pass,
as the living pass
in and out of loves
as stepping to a song.
The way I go is
marriage to this place,
grace beyond chance,
love's braided dance
covering the world.

—Wendell Berry
The Wheel

.

Leonid Tit

.

the miraculous existence and impermanence of form

 

.

Death is a favour to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder in our
Senses and eyes
Of this mysterious existence we share
And surely are just traveling through.

If I were in the tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks
And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that
We are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His cup.

If I were in the tavern to night,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world
Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long. 

Death is a favour to us,
But our minds have lost their balance. 

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.


—Hafiz

.

A World Lost

 

. 

 

I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. 

Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light's awful clarity, in seeing themselves in it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled.

In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.


—Wendell Berry

.

in praise of mortality

.

Want the change.
Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive.

And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Anita Barrows/Joanna Macy translation

.