Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

~ from Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint; First Edition, 1999)

There is more to us than
What was taken from us.

A place to call
home. Land of olive trees,
and their branches.
Palestine. There.
I’ve said it. I want to be sure
that everyone knows
from where my parents
hail. Everyone needs a place
to call home. Genocide: everyone,
I would hope, knows that it did not start
and did not end with the
Holocaust. I haven’t forgotten that
everyone needs a place on this planet. And I,
I prefer to live where I can leave
the doors unlocked —
or live without the doors —
or hell. I don’t even care
for walls. But, I do care
for the blues: water; the sadness
that comes when it is not within
sight. I don’t know if there is
a child, anywhere on this earth, that wasn’t,
at least once, held by their mother. Again,
water: where my mother held me
until I was given to land. O firm land — how my father holds
me — folks keep calling for blood, to dress you in it.
I don’t think any of them
know, truly, how much of it
the body can take; how much of it
the body can lose.

~ published in lithub May 16, 2018

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two-
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

~ from Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest writings (Lawrence Hill & Co. 1974)

Grandma once gave me a tip:
During difficult times,
you move forward in small steps.
Do what you have to do, but little by little.
Don’t think about the future,
not even what might happen tomorrow.
Wash the dishes.
Take off the dust.
Write a letter.
Make some soup.
Do you see?
You are moving forward step by step.
Take a step and stop.
Get some rest.
Compliment yourself.
Take another step.
Then another one.
You won’t notice, but your steps will grow
bigger and bigger.
And time will come
when you can think about the future
without crying.

~ First appeared on April 24, 2020, on the Facebook Page, Midwives of the Soul

(Question frequently asked by students after missing a class)

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

~ from Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993 (Harbour Publishing, 1993)

Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can’t stand it,

and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring—
live, live, live, live!—

one day you’ll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn’t promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only

you’ll let the world
soften you with its touching.

~from You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024) edited by Ada Limón

translated by Renata Gorczynski

As I walked at dawn in the forest,
in May, I kept asking where you are, souls
of the dead. Where are you, the young ones
who are missing, where are you,
the completely transformed?
Great stillness reigned in the forest,
and I heard the green leaves dream,
I heard the dream of the bark from which
boats, ships, and sails will arise.
Then, slowly, birds joined in,
goldfinches, thrushes, blackbirds
on the balconies of branches, each of them spoke
differently, in his own voice, not asking for anything,
with no bitterness or regret.
And I realized you are in singing,
unseizable as music, indifferent as
musical notes, distant from us
as we are from ourselves.

~ from Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002)

Do you still believe in borders?
Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.
You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires
travelled on wind you couldn't see
wafting over the valley
and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill

Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?
Or hear the silence of the animals no longer howling?
Now you know what it is to be afraid.

You think this is a dream? It is not
a dream. you think this is a theoretical question?

What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?
The water grows clearer. The swans settle and float there.
Are you willing to take your place in the forest again?
To become loam and bark, to be a leaf falling from a great height,
to be the worm who eats the leaf,
and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky-- are you
willing to be the sky again?

You think this lesson is too hard for you.
You want the time-out to end. You want
to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.

It can end now, but not in the way you imagine. You know
the mind that has been talking to you for so long, the mind that
can explain everything? Don't listen.

You were once a citizen of the country called: I Don't Know.
Remember the boat that brought you there? It was your body. Climb in.

~ from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Co, 2024)

I woke up early on a Tuesday,
made a pot of coffee for myself,
then drove down to the village,
stopping at the post office
then the bank where I cashed a little check
from a magazine, and when I got home
I read some of the newspaper
starting with the science section
and had another cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal.
Pretty soon, it was lunchtime.
I wasn’t at all hungry
but I paused for a moment
to look out the big kitchen window,
and that’s when I realized
that the function of poetry is to remind me
that there is much more to life
than what I am usually doing
when I’m not reading or writing poetry.
~ from Whale Day (Random House, 2020)

(to my children)

I do not doubt you would have liked
one of those pretty mothers in the ads:
complete with adoring husband and happy children.
She's always smiling, and if she cries at all
it is absent of lights and camera,
makeup washed from her face.

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:
ever since I was small like you
I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard --
(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me
when she heard).

I cannot tell you that I know the road.
Often I lose my way
and my life has been a painful crossing
navigating reefs, in and out of storms,
refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens
who invite me into the past,
neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

But I advance,
go forward holding to the hope
of some distant port
where you, my children -- I'm sure --
will pull in one day
after I've been lost at sea.


~ trans. by Margaret Randall and Elinor Randall from What Have You Lost, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, (HarperCollins, 1999)

I hate milk chocolate, don't want clouds
of cream diluting the dark night sky,
don't want pralines or raisins, rubble
in this smooth plateau. I like my coffee
black, my beer from Germany, wine
from Burgundy, the darker, the better.
I like my heroes complicated and brooding,
James Dean in oiled leather, leaning
on a motorcycle. You know the color.

Oh, chocolate! From the spice bazaars
of Africa, hulled in mills, beaten,
pressed in bars. The cold slab of a cave's
interior, when all the stars
have gone to sleep.

Chocolate strolls up to the microphone
and plays jazz at midnight, the low slow
notes of a bass clarinet. Chocolate saunters
down the runway, slouches in quaint
boutiques; its style is je ne sais quoi.
Chocolate stays up late and gambles,
likes roulette. Always bets
on the noir.

~ from More (C & R Press, 2010)

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~ from The Carrying (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018)

“In the bush, knee-deep in snow, laying tobacco down and offering prayers of thankfulness for the life of my mother, I became aware of silence. It was full and rich and tangible: I could almost reach out and touch it. I smiled then. Smiled because it becomes so simple when you surrender grief to the ongoing act of living, to being to becoming. You become aware of the silences that exist between words, between actions, choices, results, changes. That’s where you grow – in those silences. All that you feel is all that you are, and all that you know is all that you know, and you emerge from that silence ready to live out loud again: sore and blue and jubilant, outrageous and raucous and clamouring for more. The sound of silence. The sound of self emerging.”

~ from Embers, One Ojibway’s Meditations (Douglas & McIntyre, 2016)

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

~ from I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion ‎(Conari Press, 2021)

I need to witness miracles today—
a river turned to blood,
water become wine,
a burning coal touching the prophet’s lips,
black ravens swooping down
to bring a starving man bread and meat,
a poor fisherman raising the dead!
I’ve heard theologians say
this is not the age of miracles,
but still, I’m easy to impress.
I don’t need to climb out of the boat
and walk on water; I’d just like
to put my head on the pillow
while the storm still rages, and rest.

~ from The Poetry Remedy, ed by William Sieghart (Viking, 2019)

Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me

the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.

Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.

That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it

tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.

~ from Mules of Love (BOA Editions Ltd., 2002)

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this

~ from The Uncommon Speech of Paradise, Poems on the Art of Poetry (White Pine Press, 2021)

1.

Why should I have been surprised?

Hunters walk the forest

without a sound.

The hunter, strapped to his rifle,

the fox on his feet of silk,

the serpent on his empire of muscles—

all move in a stillness,

hungry, careful, intent.

Just as the cancer

entered the forest of my body,

without a sound.

2.

The question is,

what will it be like

after the last day?

Will I float

into the sky

or will I fray

within the earth or a river—

remembering nothing?

How desperate I would be

if I couldn’t remember

the sun rising, if I couldn’t

remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t

even remember, beloved,

your beloved name.

3.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

4.

Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,

all the fragile blue flowers in bloom

in the shrubs in the yard next door had

tumbled from the shrubs and lay

wrinkled and fading in the grass. But

this morning the shrubs were full of

the blue flowers again. There wasn’t

a single one on the grass. How, I

wondered, did they roll back up to

the branches, that fiercely wanting,

as we all do, just a little more of

life?

~ from Blue Horses (Penguin Press, 2014)

So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars

Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies.

Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears.

Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug.

Let’s lick the earth from our fingers.

Let us look up and out and around.

The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked,

And our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning.

Oremus.

Let us pray

~ from Daily Prayers with the Corrymeela Community (Church House Publishing, 2017)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)