Poetry that I am fond of:

Why I Write

Because when I was a girl,
maybe seven or eight,

already so battered by this
life, I realized that a pencil

looks an awful lot like
a witch's wand.

DEAR READER,

Alex Dawson

I want to tell you the truth, my truth,
even if it hurts me, even if it hurts

you, I want to give name to
the nameless, to bring light

to things you carry in your
darkness, I want to look so deeply

inward, to the secret places we all
keep, those stories tucked between

our ribs. Every time I write a
poem, I am performing

open heart surgery, every time
you read my words, it means that

I survived.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

—Wendell Berry

Passage from Letters to a Young Poet

"Through a fortunate mimicry of our natural surroundings, we have grown so adapted to life after thousands of years that we can hardly be distinguished from the living forms around us. We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If our world has fears, they are our fears. If it has an abyss, it belongs to us. If danger appears, we must try to love them. And if we will live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what seems most difficult will become our truest and most trustworthy friend. How could we forget the myths about dragons who at the last moment transform into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once with courage. Perhaps, every terror is, at its core, something helpless that wants our help.

So, dear Mr. Kappus, do not be afraid when a sorrow as great as any you’ve known seems about to engulf you, casting its shadow over all you do. Remember, when you fear what might befall you, that Life has not abandoned you, that it is holding you, and out of its web you cannot fall—why would you want to exclude from your existence any unrest, any pain, any heaviness? For you don’t know yet how these will shape you. Why do you want to torture yourself with questions about where all this may be coming from and where it is going? For you know that you are in the midst of a passage and nothing could be more desired than transformation. If there is some illness in your system, think of it this way: Illness is the means by which an organism frees itself from invasion. Then the organism must only be helped to be sick, to break through into the full sickness, for that is the way forward."
— Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

No need at all of hills and streams
For quiet meditation;
When the mind had been extinguished
Even fire is refreshing.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, grass grows by itself

Lotus Pond

Barbara Hurd

Like uncoiling cobras summoned by flute,
stems rise, out of muck by music,
by the chance,
here again, to ripen and swell
until each leaf unfolds
purple side down, pins
its green heart open on a mirror
with ten thousand others
on a sheen of water-silk.
This is how compassion grows,
out of the mud, mottled by bruise.
And this is what it asks:
Among ten thousand stems intertwined
and swaying in underwater twilight.
Who can trace which stalk
to which flower?
Who can say which heart is mine?
Which yours?

"Leap, and the net will appear."

To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of plreasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.
—Barbara Brown Taylor

From The Allegory of the Pit: Or the Irony of Victory, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/

We think of death too strictly I think, as this absolute terminal point. I am interested in spaces in culture, for gatherings, where we touch the traces of our unbecoming and notice where we are falling apart. Where we reimagine death not as something down the line, but a paradigm, a thick now, an immanent field of loss and creativity that is entangled with what we rudely tease out as ‘life’. Modernity is about putting things together neatly, proliferating still images, being coherent, noble, independent. Consider what might be produced if, instead of thinking of death strictly as a firm line or an isolated event, we find ways to experiment with how we are already falling away, and how, for example, your identity is dying, how you are nomadic, diasporic, constantly moving, even when the habits of my perceiving you compel me to see you as a white woman. If we had practices to notice the ways where our names, our bodies are changing and giving way to something else. How we are actually ghosts (...) This is what I mean by fugitive exile: leaving the plantation which reproduces images and instead helping us to see we are beyond static images. We are not as photographic as we think we are. We are abroad in ways that escape the ‘Man’, the head of the pyramid, of the capitalist structure. And that is the invitation of a constellation of processional relational ontologies.

Alexandria

A woman lived in ancient times;
she could not read or write.
But oh, the stories she could tell
were each a soul's delight.

The introvert has many thoughts,
but most will stay within.
And when he dies, those thoughts
will fade,
as if they'd never been.

The elderly have lived their days,
and time has left its mark.
There's history within their minds,
of love and loss and lark.

Who knows what knowledge becomes lost
Each time life's hourglass turns.
For people live, then people go;
with each, a library burns.

Gravel, Mary Oliver

When death

carts me off to the bottomlands

when I begin

the long work of rising —

Death, whoever and whatever you are, tallest kind of tall kings,

grant me these wishes:

unstring my bones;

let me be not one thing but all things, and wondrously scattered,

shake me free from my name.

Let the wind, and the wildflowers, and the catbird

never know it. Let time loosen me like the bead of a flower from its wrappings

of leaves.

The Mask

Author unknown

Always a mask
Held in the slim hand whitely
Always she had a mask before her
face-
Truly the wrist
Holding it lightly
Fitted the task:
Sometimes however
Was there a shiver,
Fingertip quiver,
Ever so slightly-
Holding the mask ?

For years and years and years I
wondered
But dared not ask
And then-
I blundered,
Looked behind the mask,
To find
Nothing-
She had no face.

She had become
Merely a hand
Holding a mask
With grace.

another list of poems I adore in no particular order: