by Denise Levertov
a profile is here at the Poetry Foundation
Leaf through discolored manuscripts
make sure no words
lie thirsting, bleeding.
waiting for rescue. No:
old loves half-
articulated, moments forced
out of the stream of perception
to play “statue.”
and never released –
they had no blood to shed.
You must seek
the ashy nest itself
if you hope to find
charred feathers, smoldering flightbones,
and a twist of singing flame
rekindling.
By Ted Hughes
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –
And you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pil lifted, still and brimming – mirror
To tempt a first star to tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
“Moon!” you cry suddenly, “Moon! Moon!”
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
By Valerie Mejer (trans. Forrest Gander)
Nothing’s in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens.
Maybe something like night in the deep hollow,
an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup.
Nothing’s in the nest. No thread. No web of words.
Maybe something like my navel, the eclipse of a magnifying glass.
A slice, mute with regard to its empty depths
In the nest, nothing. The web unwoven. Dismembered.
In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags
taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes my eyes
which cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there.
By Jalaluddin Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the centre of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
By Jorge Luis Borges
With slow love she looked at the scattered
Colours of afternoon. It pleased her
To lose herself in intricate melody
Or in the curious life of verses.
Not elemental red but the greys
Spun her delicate destiny,
Fashioned to discriminate and exercised
In vacillation and in blended tints.
Without venturing to tread this perplexing
Labyrinth, she watched from without
The shapes of things, their tumult and their course,
Just like that other lady of the mirror
Gods who dwell far-off past prayer
Abandoned her to that tiger, Fire.
By Mary Oliver
Profile at The Poetry FoundationYou do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and i will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
by W.B. Yeats
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But, I, being poor, have only my dreams,
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
By Ruth Stone
Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?
Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze –
like a canopy.
But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is –
hanging at the window
of an empty room.
By Jo Shapcott
Indoors for this ash
is through the bark;
notice its colour –
asphalt or slate in the rain –
then go inside, tasting
weather in the tree of rings,
scoffing years of drought and storm,
moving as fast as a woodworm
who finds a kick of speed
for burrowing into the core,
for mouthing pith and sap
until the O my god at the heart.
By Hugh MacDiarmid
I found a pigeon’s skull on the machair,
All the bones pure white and dry, and chalky,
But perfect,
Without a crack or a flaw anywhere.
At the back, rising out of the beak,
Were domes like bubbles of thin bone,
Almost transparent, where the brain had been
That fixed the tilt of the wings.
*Trans: the dead open the eyes of those who live South Uist, Outer Hebrides machair = low, lying grassy plain As found in the Rattle Bag anthology edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
A Flight of Cranes 