Posts in: Poetry by others
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The Excesses of God
Robinson Jeffers

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.



Prayer after Eating
Wendell Berry

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

[published in The Country of Marriage]



An appropriate reading when you’re coming down with some kind of sickness:

It isn’t hard to inhabit Tao’s Way.
Just stop picking and choosing,

stop hating this and loving that,
and you’re there bright and clear.

A hair-width distinction is error
enough to split heaven-and-earth:

to face Tao’s shimmering Way
simply give up like and dislike,

for battling things you dislike
is mind’s great disease.

The Way of Ch’an, “Fact-Mind Inscription”, translated David Hinton.


Many thanks to @johnbrady for calling this to my attention in a comment on my earlier post

Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.



On Top
Gary Snyder

All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
sift down even.
Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.


“The Green Man”, a poem by William Anderson

Like antlers, like veins of the brain the birches Mark patterns of mind on the red winter sky; ‘I am thought of all plants,’ says the Green Man, ‘I am thought of all plants,’ says he. The hungry birds harry the last berries of rowan But white is her bark in the darkness of rain; ‘I rise with the sap,’ says the Green Man, ‘I rise with the sap,’ says he.

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“The Reassurer” by Wendell Berry

A people in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food, who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they breathe, drink, and eat, such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not logical, but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever. The President reassures the farmer and his wife who have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it, and not have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the prosperity of corporations; he consoles the Navajos, who have been exiled from their place of exile, because the poor land contained something required for the national prosperity, after all; he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a substance used in the normal course of national prosperity to make red apples redder; he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of the floor of a mined-out stripmine; from his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their misfortunes, and that these are equal rights.

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