Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
Like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
All this must go so you know
How desolate the landscape can be
Between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
Thinking the bus will never stop,
The passengers eating maize and chicken
Will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
Lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
How he too was someone
Who journeyed through the night with plans
And the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
Catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
Only kindness that ties your shoes
And sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
And then goes with you everywhere
Like a shadow or a friend.

~ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)

First you'll come to the end of the freeway.
Then it's not so much north on Woodland Avenue
as it is a feeling that the pines are taller and weigh more,
and the road, you'll notice,
is older with faded lines and unmown shoulders.
You'll see a cemetery on your right
and another later on your left.
Sobered, drive on.
                             Drive on for miles
if the fields are full of hawkweed and daisies.
Sometimes a spotted horse
will gallop along the fence. Sometimes you'll see
a hawk circling, sometimes a vulture.
You'll cross the river many times
over smaller and smaller bridges.
You'll know when you're close;
people always say they have a sudden sensation
that the horizon, which was always far ahead,
is now directly behind them.
At this point you may want to park
and proceed on foot, or even
on your knees.

~ from On Speaking Terms. Copper Canyon Press, 2010

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don't say
it's easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

 ~from Devotions (Penguin Books, 2017)

Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder
in the middle of gray November
what I hoped to do comes back,
asking.

Across the street the fiery trees
hold onto their leaves,
red and gold in the final months
of this unfinished year,
they offer blazing riddles.

In the frozen fields of my life
there are no shortcuts to spring,
but stories of great birds in migration
carrying small ones on their backs,
predators flying next to warblers
they would, in a different season, eat.

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

~ from The Light of Invisible Bodies: Poems (Daniel and Daniel Publishing, 2003)

What does it mean to be a poet
in war time? It means that you
apologize. You apologize
excessively to the burned-out
trees to the birds without nests
to the flattened houses to the
long cracks in the road's
midsection to the children, pallid
in death and before it and to the
face of every grieving or
murdered mother

What does it mean to be safe in
a time of war? It means you are
ashamed of your smile of your
warmth of your clean clothes of
your yawning of your cup of
coffee of your undisturbed sleep
of your beloveds alive of your
satiety of accessible water of
clean water of your ability to
bathe and of the coincidence that
you are still alive!

Oh God I do not wish to be this poet in a time of war!

~This poem appeared in The Gaza's Poet Society, 2023.

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I'm looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?

  ~ from The Wild Iris (Eccobooks, 1992)

I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back 
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap 
as if to make amends.

~ from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems by Linda (W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.)

at the Sipsey River

make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?

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

and asked the bird if it feels
trapped by its song, by its language
being known only as melody.
Its eloquent speech ‘my home
is endless and dying’ reduced to piping
notes, a shrill ringtone. I am
talking to myself. The birds are gone.
This is the problem of poetry.
We siren our warnings and the world
drowns to the sound of our beautiful
voices. I would not want it any other way.
I love a good dirge. Am I tired of being
told to claim my joy. What am I to do
with happiness? Where on earth
can happiness reside? An astonishing number
of my family are dead. An astonishing
number of my family are alive.
I woke up for this song.

~ from non-essential work (2023)

Want the change.  Be inspired by the flame

Where everything shines as it disappears.

The artist, when sketching, loves nothing as much

as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.

Is it safer to be gray and numb?

What turns hard becomes rigid

and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.

Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking

finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation

it did not think it could survive.  And Daphne,* becoming a laurel,

dares you to become the wind.

~ from In Praise of Mortality (Riverhead Books, 2005. Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—

my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindles smaller than the space

between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,

comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.

translated by Arthur Symons

When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long

Pale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours toll deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over,
And I weep.

And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.

~This poem is in the public domain

The wind in the grass is silent.
Flowers tremble like gentle
movements in the bath.
The spruce trees are brooding,
almost whispering.
How can so much silence be so loud?

I know what all this means:
the end of August and something
down south is heading for us,
barrelling its way up the coastline.

The swallows are gathering.
The vixen is curled in her den.
They know what's on the go.

So I flipped over the lawn chairs,
upsidedowned the picnic table,
as if to say, The wind can't
toss them now.

Too bad we can't flatten the roofs
squash them to the ground
and then open them again when it passes.

The old accordion trick.

~from the wind has robbed the legs off a madwoman (Breakwater Books, 2024)

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

From Evidence (Beacon, 2009)

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

~from Complete Poems 1904-1962 (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991)

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)