{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Poetry by others on jabel", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2021/97100.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://jabel.blog/", "feed_url": "https://jabel.blog/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/06/16/the-wild-geese.html", "title": "The Wild Geese", "content_html": "

From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

\n

Horseback on Sunday morning,
\nharvest over, we taste persimmon
\nand wild grape, sharp sweet
\nof summer’s end. In time’s maze
\nover the fall fields, we name names
\nthat went west from here, names
\nthat rest on graves. We open
\na persimmon seed to find the tree
\nthat stands in promise,
\npale, in the seed’s marrow.
\nGeese appear high over us,
\npass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
\nas in love or sleep, holds
\nthem to their way, clear,
\nin the ancient faith: what we need
\nis here. And we pray, not
\nfor new earth or heaven, but to be
\nquiet in heart, and in eye
\nclear. What we need is here.

\n", "date_published": "2026-06-16T07:31:27-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/06/16/the-wild-geese.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others","Wendell Berry"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/05/01/may-is-marys-month.html", "title": "\"May is Mary's month\"", "content_html": "

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
\nGrass and greenworld all together ;
\nStar-eyed strawberry-breasted
\nThrostle above her nested
\n
\nCluster of bugle blue eggs thin
\nForms and warms the life within ;
\nAnd bird and blossom swell
\nIn sod or sheath or shell.
\n
\nAll things rising, all things sizing
\nMary sees, sympathizing
\nWith that world of good
\nNature’s motherhood.

\n

From “The May Magnificat” by Gerald Manley Hopkins

\n", "date_published": "2026-05-01T08:24:12-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/05/01/may-is-marys-month.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/04/01/hail-lady-seastar-bright.html", "title": "Hail, lady, sea-star bright", "content_html": "

I recently came across a wonderful Marian prayer and thought I’d share it here. I’ve added to the Clerk of Oxford’s translations in brackets, but all the translations are from her post.

\n
\n

Hail, lady, sea-star bright,
\nGod’s mother, edy wight [blessed creature]
\nMaiden ever, first and late,
\nOf heaven’s realm the sely gate. [blessed gate]
\nThe ‘Ave’ thou received in spell [message]
\nFrom the angel’s mouth called Gabriel
\nIn grith [peace] us set and shielded from shame,
\nAnd turneth backward Eva’s name.
\nGuilty men’s bonds unbind,
\nBring light to them who are blind.
\nPut from us our sin
\nAnd earn for us all wynne. [joy]
\nShow that thou art mother alone
\nAnd before him take thou our bone [petition]
\nWho for us thy child became
\nAnd of thee our kind name. [took our nature]
\nMaid alone, thou wert with child,
\nAmong all so mild;
\nOf sin release us in haste,
\nAnd make us meek and chaste.
\nLife give thou us clean, [pure]
\nA safe way prepare, and lene [grant]
\nThat we Jesus see
\nAnd ever blithe be.
\nTo Father, Christ and Holy Ghost be thanks and praising,
\nTo three persons and one God, one honour and worshipping.

\n
\n

Being a Tolkien nerd, this all has Elven resonances. That’s obviously intentional, since Tolkien was both a Catholic and a scholar who certainly knew a great deal about the “Mary, star of the sea” tradition.

\n

In Rivendell, they sang to Elbereth:

\n
\n

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
\nsilivren penna míriel
\no menel aglar elenath!
\nNa-chaered palan-díriel
\no galadhremmin ennorath,
\nFanuilos, le linnathon
\nnef aear, sí nef aearon!

\n
\n
\n

O Elbereth Starkindler,
\nwhite-glittering, slanting falls, sparkling like jewels,
\nfrom the firmament the glory of the starry host!
\nHaving gazed afar into remote distance
\nfrom the tree-tangled Middle-lands,
\nEverwhite, to thee I will chant
\non this side of the ocean, here on this side of the Great Ocean!

\n
\n

Another Elven song:

\n
\n

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
\nO Queen beyond the Western Seas!
\nO light to us that wander here
\nAmid the world of woven trees!

\n

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
\nClear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!
\nSnow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee
\nIn a far land beyond the sea.

\n

O Stars that in the Sunless Year
\nWith shining hand by her were sown,
\nIn windy fields now bright and clear
\nWe see your silver blossom blown!

\n

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
\nWe still remember, we who dwell
\nIn this far land beneath the trees,
\nThy starlight on the Western Seas.

\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T10:08:41-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/04/01/hail-lady-seastar-bright.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/01/08/those-winter-sundays-by-robert.html", "title": "Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden", "content_html": "

Sundays too my father got up early
\nand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
\nthen with cracked hands that ached
\nfrom labor in the weekday weather made
\nbanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
\n
\nI’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
\nWhen the rooms were warm, he’d call,
\nand slowly I would rise and dress,
\nfearing the chronic angers of that house,
\n
\nSpeaking indifferently to him,
\nwho had driven out the cold
\nand polished my good shoes as well.
\nWhat did I know, what did I know
\nof love’s austere and lonely offices?

\n", "date_published": "2026-01-08T20:42:13-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/01/08/those-winter-sundays-by-robert.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/10/08/i-have-a-tab-open.html", "content_html": "

I have a tab open with Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us” and I’ve read it several times over the last few days. I think I have @tinyroofnail to thank for this.

\n", "date_published": "2025-10-08T18:26:48-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/10/08/i-have-a-tab-open.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/07/11/goodfellowship-by-li-po.html", "title": "Goodfellowship by Li Po", "content_html": "

Hast thou not beheld the Yellow River\n
Which flows from Heaven?\n
It runs rapidly down and empties into the sea,\n
Nevermore to return.

\n

Hast thou beheld the mirror in the hall\n
That reflects the grief of white hair?\n
In the morning it is like black silk,\n
In the evening it will be covered with snow.

\n

While we are in the mood of joy,\n
Let us drink!\n
Let not the golden bottle be lonely,\n
Let us waste not the moon!

\n", "date_published": "2025-07-11T08:24:55-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/07/11/goodfellowship-by-li-po.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/05/28/elegy-written-in-a-country.html", "content_html": "

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray, read by Iain McGilchrist

\n", "date_published": "2025-05-28T06:08:25-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/05/28/elegy-written-in-a-country.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/01/10/happy-birthday-to-robinson-jeffers.html", "content_html": "

Happy birthday to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), “inhumanist” poet of the central California coast. In one of the highlights of 2022 and possibly my life, we visited Tor House and Hawk Tower and got a personal tour. They ask visitors not to post any interior photos, so here I am standing outside the gate while we awaited our guide.

\n\"Auto-generated\r\n

I have three birthdays of people unrelated to me on my calendar: Wendell Berry, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robinson Jeffers. They are there because each writer’s unique vision has formed me in important ways.

\n

If Wendell Berry is my icon for the close, domestic, and dear, then Robinson Jeffers is my icon for wild and indifferent nature. He is medicine for our innate, human egocentrism. He called his outlook “inhumanism” and described it like this:

\n
\n

It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies have realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. This attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.

\n
\n
\n

…

\n
\n
\n

To sum up the matter:–“Love one another” is a high commandment, but it polarizes the mind; love on the surface implies hate in the depth,–(Dante who hated well because he loved)–as the history of Christendom bitterly proves. “Love one another” ought to be balanced, at least, by a colder saying,–this too a counsel of perfection, i.e., a direction-giver, a guide though it cannot be a rule,–“Turn away from each other,"–to that great presence of which humanity is only a squirming particle. To persons of Christian faith, if any should read this, I would point out that Jesus himself, intuitive master of psychology, invoked this balance. “Love your neighbor as yourself”–that is, not excessively, if you are adult and normal–but “God with all your heart, mind and soul.” Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity.

\n
\n

Our lives are so taken up with ourselves. We spends hours of each day talking to each other, watching and dreaming about each other. Jeffers, though, sitting atop his pile of sea-washed granite overlooking the Pacific, writes of hawks and storms and takes a long view of history. Reality is out there, beautiful and pitiless.

\n

Credo
\nMy friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
\nAnd gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
\nThe God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
\nAppalling presence, the power of the waters.
\nHe believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
\nBred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
\nMultitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
\nThe bone vault’s ocean; out there is the ocean’s;
\nThe water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
\nPasses, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
\nThe beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
\nWill remain when there is no heart to break for it.

\n", "date_published": "2025-01-10T18:21:14-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/01/10/happy-birthday-to-robinson-jeffers.html", "tags": ["Longer writing","Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/12/26/i-think-about-this-one.html", "content_html": "

I think about this one now and then. The most sensuous poem I know. The minute observation of his father’s work is deeply moving.

\n

Digging
\nSeamus Heaney
\n
\nBetween my finger and my thumb
\nThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
\n
\nUnder my window, a clean rasping sound
\nWhen the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
\nMy father, digging. I look down
\n
\nTill his straining rump among the flowerbeds
\nBends low, comes up twenty years away
\nStooping in rhythm through potato drills
\nWhere he was digging.
\n
\nThe coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
\nAgainst the inside knee was levered firmly.
\nHe rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
\nTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,
\nLoving their cool hardness in our hands.
\n
\nBy God, the old man could handle a spade.
\nJust like his old man.
\n
\nMy grandfather cut more turf in a day
\nThan any other man on Toner’s bog.
\nOnce I carried him milk in a bottle
\nCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
\nTo drink it, then fell to right away
\nNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
\nOver his shoulder, going down and down
\nFor the good turf. Digging.
\n
\nThe cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
\nOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
\nThrough living roots awaken in my head.
\nBut I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
\n
\nBetween my finger and my thumb
\nThe squat pen rests.
\nI’ll dig with it.

\n", "date_published": "2024-12-26T11:35:17-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/12/26/i-think-about-this-one.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/10/22/the-excesses-of.html", "content_html": "\"Auto-generated\n

The Excesses of God
\nRobinson Jeffers

\n

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
\nOur God? For to equal a need
\nIs natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
\nRainbows over the rain
\nAnd beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
\nOn the domes of deep sea-shells,
\nAnd make the necessary embrace of breeding
\nBeautiful also as fire,
\nNot even the weeds to multiply without blossom
\nNor the birds without music:
\nThere is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
\nThe extravagant kindness, the fountain
\nHumanity can understand, and would flow likewise
\nIf power and desire were perch-mates.

\n", "date_published": "2024-10-22T18:47:01-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/10/22/the-excesses-of.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/10/22/wendell-berry-another-day-sabbath.html", "content_html": "

Wendell Berry, Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023

\n\n", "date_published": "2024-10-22T11:38:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/10/22/wendell-berry-another-day-sabbath.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others","Wendell Berry"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/02/01/prayer-after-eatingwendell.html", "content_html": "

Prayer after Eating
\nWendell Berry

\n

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

\n

[published in The Country of Marriage]

\n", "date_published": "2024-02-01T11:13:51-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/02/01/prayer-after-eatingwendell.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others","Wendell Berry"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/01/14/wendell-berry-reads.html", "content_html": "

Wendell Berry reads “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer”

\n", "date_published": "2024-01-14T15:38:18-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/01/14/wendell-berry-reads.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others","Wendell Berry"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/12/14/an-appropriate-reading.html", "content_html": "

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

\n
\n

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

\n
\n
\n

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

\n
\n
\n

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

\n
\n
\n

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

\n
\n
\n

for battling things you dislike
\nis mind’s great disease.

\n
\n

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

\n", "date_published": "2023-12-14T19:41:38-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/12/14/an-appropriate-reading.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/10/16/many-thanks-to.html", "content_html": "

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

\n

Conscientious Objector
\nEdna St. Vincent Millay

\n

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

\n

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

\n

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
\nnor of my enemies either.
\nThough he promise me much,
\nI will not map him the route to any man’s door.
\nAm I a spy in the land of the living,
\nthat I should deliver men to Death?
\nBrother, the password and the plans of our city
\nare safe with me; never through me
\nShall you be overcome.

\n", "date_published": "2023-10-16T13:55:23-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/10/16/many-thanks-to.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/05/happy-birthday-wendell-berry-read.html", "content_html": "

Happy birthday, Wendell Berry! Read something of his in honor of the day. Maybe an essay like “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” or maybe the poem attached, from A Timbered Choir.

\n\n", "date_published": "2023-08-05T09:14:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/05/happy-birthday-wendell-berry-read.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others","Wendell Berry"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/25/on-top-gary.html", "content_html": "

On Top
\nGary Snyder

\n

All this new stuff goes on top
\nturn it over, turn it over
\nwait and water down
\nfrom the dark bottom
\nturn it inside out
\nlet it spread through
\nsift down even.
\nWatch it sprout.

\n

A mind like compost.

\n", "date_published": "2023-05-25T14:43:36-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/25/on-top-gary.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/11/the-green-man.html", "title": "“The Green Man”, a poem by William Anderson", "content_html": "

Like antlers, like veins of the brain the birches
\nMark patterns of mind on the red winter sky;
\n‘I am thought of all plants,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I am thought of all plants,’ says he.
\n
\nThe hungry birds harry the last berries of rowan
\nBut white is her bark in the darkness of rain;
\n‘I rise with the sap,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I rise with the sap,’ says he.
\n
\nThe ashes are clashing their boughs like sword-dancers,
\nTheir black buds are tracing wild faces in the clouds;
\n‘I come with the wind,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I come with the wind,’ says he.
\n
\nThe alders are rattling as though ready for battle
\nGuarding the grove where she waits for her lover;
\n‘I burn with desire,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I burn with desire,’ says he.
\n
\nIn and out of the yellowing wands of the willow
\nThe pollen-bright bees are plundering the catkins;
\n‘I am honey of love,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I am honey of love,’ says he.
\n
\nThe hedges of quick are thick with may blossom
\nAs the dancers advance on the leaf-covered King;
\n‘It’s off with my head,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘It’s off with my head,’ says he.
\n
\nGreen Man becomes grown man in flames of the oak
\nAs its crown forms his mask and its leafage his features;
\n‘I speak through the oak,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I speak through the oak,’ says he.
\u2028
\nThe holly is flowering as hayfields are rolling
\nTheir gleaming long grasses like waves of the sea;
\n‘I shine with the sun,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I shine with the sun,’ says he.
\n
\nThe hazels are rocking the cups of their nuts
\nAs the harvesters shout when the last sheaf is cut;
\n‘I swim with the salmon,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I swim with the salmon,’ says he.
\n
\nThe globes of the grapes are robing with bloom
\nLike the hazes of autumn, like the Milky Way’s stardust;
\n‘I am crushed for your drink,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I am crushed for your drink,’ says he.
\n
\nThe aspen drops silver of leaves on earth’s salver
\nAnd the poplars shed gold on the young ivy flowerheads;
\n‘I have paid for your pleasure,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I have paid for your pleasure,’ says he.
\n
\nThe reedbeds are flanking in silence the islands
\nWhere meditates Wisdom as she waits and waits;
\n‘I have kept her secret,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I have kept her secret,’ says he
\n
\nThe bark of the elder makes whistles for children
\nTo call to the deer as they rove over the snow;
\n‘I am born in the dark,’ says the Green Man,
\n‘I am born in the dark,’ says he.

\n

Source: Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth by William Anderson

\n", "date_published": "2023-05-11T12:38:09-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/11/the-green-man.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/08/15/the-reassurer-by-wendell-berry.html", "title": "“The Reassurer” by Wendell Berry", "content_html": "

A people in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air,
\n    drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food,
\nwho take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they
\n    breathe, drink, and eat,
\nsuch a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not
\n    logical,
\nbut it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells
\n    them that all is well, all is better than ever.
\nThe President reassures the farmer and his wife who have exhausted their
\n    farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it,
\nand not have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake of the free
\n    market, foreign trade, and the prosperity of corporations;
\nhe consoles the Navajos, who have been exiled from their place of exile,
\n    because the poor land contained something required for the national
\n    prosperity, after all;
\nhe consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a substance used
\n    in the normal course of national prosperity to make red apples redder;
\nhe consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit watching TV in
\n    their mobile home on the mud of the floor of a mined-out stripmine;
\nfrom his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right to their
\n    fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their misfortunes, and
\n    that these are equal rights.
\nThe President smiles with the disarming smile of a man who has seen God,
\n    and found Him a true American, not overbearingly smart.
\nThe President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Humane Health
\n    for Profit Corporation of America, who knows in his replaceable heart
\n    that health, if it came, would bring financial ruin;
\nhe reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory and Honor for Profit
\n    Corporation of America, who has been wakened in the night by a
\n    dream of the calamity of peace.

\n", "date_published": "2022-08-15T06:30:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/08/15/the-reassurer-by-wendell-berry.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others","Wendell Berry"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/06/06/nevertheless-ill-be.html", "content_html": "

Nevertheless, I’ll be looking for you tomorrow, Jeffers.

\n\"\"\n", "date_published": "2022-06-06T20:07:44-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/06/06/nevertheless-ill-be.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/04/17/introductory-note-this.html", "content_html": "

Introductory note: This poem surely lies behind what I’ve written lately about self-consciousness (here, here), even if I didn’t have it in mind at the time. Jeffers describes consciousness here as “unreasonable excess, / Our needless quality”, a characteristic that must arise in some way from our biology but is also outside it. He imagines our bodies and our consciousness as the creations of two gods (hello, Gnosticism!). The “uncalled for God” (demiurge?) adds consciousness on top of the natural beauty created by the “austerer God” (monad?). Consciousness becomes a burden for human beings, the poison in the well that corrupts all our experience.

\n

I.

\n

What catches the eye the quick hand reaches toward
\nOr plotting brain circuitously secures,
\nThe will is not required, is not our lord,
\nWe seek nor flee not pleasure nor pain of ours.
\nThe bullet flies the way the rifle’s fired,
\nThen what is this unreasonable excess,
\nOur needless quality, this unrequired
\nException in the world, this consciousness?
\nOur nerves and brain have their own chemic changes,
\nThis springs of them yet surely it stands outside.
\nIt feeds in the same pasture and it ranges
\nUp and down the same hills, but unallied,
\nHowever symbiotic, with the cells
\nThat weave tissues and lives. It is something else.

\n

II.

\n

As if there were two Gods: the first had made
\nAll visible things, waves, mountains, stars and men,
\nThe sweet forms dancing on through flame and shade,
\nThe swift messenger nerves that sting the brain,
\nThe brain itself and the answering strands that start
\nExplosion in the muscles, the indrinking eye
\nOf cunning crystal, the hands and the feet, the heart
\nAnd feeding entrails, and the organs that tie
\nThe generations into one wreath, one strand;
\nAll tangible things or chemical processes
\nNeeds only brain and patience to understand:
\nThen the other God comes suddenly and says
\n“I crown or damn. I have different fire to add.
\nThese forms shall feel, ache, love, grieve and be glad."

\n

III.

\n

There is the insolence, there is the sting, the rapture.
\nBy what right did that fire-bringer come in?
\nThe uncalled for God to conquer us all and capture,
\nMaster of joy and misery, troubler of men.
\nStill we divide allegiance: suddenly
\nAn August sundown on a mountain road
\nThe marble pomps, the primal majesty
\nAnd senseless beauty of that austerer God
\nCome to us, so we love him as men love
\nA mountain, not their kind: love growing intense
\nChanges to joy that we grow conscious of:
\nThere is the rapture, the sting, the insolence.
\n…..Or mourn dead beauty a bird-bright-May-morning:
\nThe insufferable insolence, the sting.

\n", "date_published": "2022-04-17T09:11:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/04/17/introductory-note-this.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/02/28/190912.html", "title": "“Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke", "content_html": "

Translated by Joanna Macy
\n
\nListen
\nGod speaks to each of us as he makes us,
\nthen walks with us silently out of the night.
\n
\nThese are the words we dimly hear:
\n
\nYou, sent out beyond your recall,
\ngo to the limits of your longing.
\nEmbody me.
\n
\nFlare up like a flame
\nand make big shadows I can move in.
\n
\nLet everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
\nJust keep going. No feeling is final.
\nDon’t let yourself lose me.
\n
\nNearby is the country they call life.
\nYou will know it by its seriousness.
\n
\nGive me your hand.
\n
\nThanks to John Halstead for mentioning this poem.

\n", "date_published": "2022-02-28T20:09:12-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/02/28/190912.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/01/26/robinson-jeffers-standing-beside-tor.html", "content_html": "

Robinson Jeffers, standing beside Tor House and Hawk Tower, his handmade stone outpost on the Pacific Ocean. (Image source)

\n

“I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration’s / End” (Jeffers, “The Torch-Bearers’ Race”)

\n\n", "date_published": "2022-01-26T11:18:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/01/26/robinson-jeffers-standing-beside-tor.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2021/12/22/what-would-the.html", "content_html": "

What would the world be, once bereft
\nOf wet and wilderness? Let them be left,
\nO let them be left, wilderness and wet;
\nLong live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
\n

\n\n\"\"\n", "date_published": "2021-12-22T08:30:38-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2021/12/22/what-would-the.html", "tags": ["Poetry by others"] } ] }