Tag: poetry

The Summer Day

Poem 133 – The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver

The Invitation – Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dream for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what “planets are squaring your moon.”
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moving to “hide it” or “fade it” or “fix it.”

I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful to “be realistic” to “remember the limitations of being human.”

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from God’s presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

How I Became a Madman (Prologue) by Kahlil Gibran

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the marketplace, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

The Madman: His Parables and Poems. by Kahlil Gibran

I Love you but…

I miss you and don’t want to not have you in my life.
You want me how you want me.
Not how I want me.

How do I keep me when I try to exist with you?
Can I have you in my life and still live my best life?
Are you taking up space or empowering me to grown?
You want to be what I need, but in action (practice), cannot be who I need.

I love you but…
I love you, but the time is wrong.
I love you, but I’m struggling to let go.

I love you, but I love me more.



Maybe this time it will be different

The harder he pushes, the worse he fucks.
That aggression, so relentless,
Yet that thrust, so limited, so underwhelming.
The talk, the insistence, the pressure,
I give in, my brain convinces me it’s just easier this way.

All for….
Disappointment, emptiness, sadness.
One minute of ecstasy?
Was that what that was supposed to be?
Unclear, as I left my body the moment my brain gave in.

I lay there now, tossed aside.
Needs unmet,
Needs not communicated, not heard.
Resentful.
Angry at myself.

I let it happen again.
I did not respect my boundaries.
This weakness, to fall back into behaviours that don’t serve me.
For what?
To believe that this is my only value.

I know better,
I deserve better,
Yet I struggle to believe that this is not my only worth.