Entering 2022

Here are some poems, most by poets I don’t know, that grabbed my attention and my imagination. I think they offer some luminous ideas to have meandering around in my heart and mind as a new year begins. I hope you find something that captures your attentions and gives you something to plant in your heart. The photos are ones I took this past fall.

Elegy in Joy (excerpt) | Muriel Rukeyser

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,

or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,

for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,

cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,

all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,

soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,

white towers, eyes of children: 

saying in time of war What shall we feed?

I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.

Not all things are blest, but the

seeds of all things are blest.

The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.

Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey

toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,

fierce pure life, the many-living home.

Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all

new techniques for the healing of the wound,

and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

We are all God’s poems | Philip Metres

all I crave is light & yet                                

winter

sky is busy imitating milk

frozen in an upturned bowl

to be a person is a sounding

through,           

host of breath

rehoused & rib scribbled inside

you there above                   

the page

casting your gaze over us

wanting us to be your mouth

& what would you say                     

with my body

bowed to bear the weight

of a line so taut it sings

To Make a Prairie | Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Rock Me, Mercy | Yusef Komunyakaa

The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
The singing in the electrical woods
has gone dumb. It looks like rain
because it is too warm to snow.
Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding,
we know you can't be everywhere at once.
Have you corralled all the pretty wild
horses? The memory of ants asleep
in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur.
The magpies gaze at us, still
waiting. River stones are listening.
But all we can say now is,
Mercy, please, rock me.