Poems That Inspire
The poems in this section are meant to inspire you. If you have a poem to share, please send it to Kay (kay@earthcreativity.org) to say that you'd like to post it here.
Don't Go Back to Sleep
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
The market only wants to buy and sell you
Listen to the sound underneath the ground
Deep inside your dreams the heart is beating.
(Don't go back to sleep.)
You know that you must ask for your treasure
Move, therefore, toward the greatest pleasure
Fight to stay awake
Choose the path you take
Even if you don't know where it's going
Trust your own unknowing
(Don't go back to sleep.)
It's so easy to be there with your long perfumed hair
And the footstep on the stair in the cool of the evening
No one sees me as I draw back the veil on a wave of creation
The physical sensation of another world...
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
The market only wants to buy and sell you
Fight to stay awake
Choose the path you take
Even if you don't know where it's going
Trust your own unknowing
(Don't go back to sleep!)
Words & Music by Jan Garrett
http://jangarrett.com
The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
Because the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love making
sweeps you forward.
Distance does not make you falter
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
by Goethe
Rumi's Field
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
by Rumi
Wild Geese
You 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 headed 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.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
http://www.maryoliver.net/
Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
from Sleeping In The Forest by Mary Oliver
http://www.maryoliver.net/
The Journey
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
by Mary Oliver
http://www.maryoliver.net/
Weird Failures
I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
birds and animals and the ants--
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in
your mothers womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around
entirely orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself,
and decided to walk into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten
what you once knew,
and that is why everything you do
has some weird failure in it.
by Kabir
To Be A Slave Of Intensity
Friend, hope for the guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think...and think...while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten --
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now, you will simply end up
with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life,
you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth,
find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this:
When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all of the work.
Look at me,
and you will see
a slave of that intensity.
by Kabir
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
by Wendell Berry
Now I Become Myself
Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places,
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"hurry, you will be dead before -----"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
or the end of the poem, is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!.....
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the Sun!
by May Sarton
The Tao
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
by The Tao Te Ching
D. H. Lawrence
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.
by D. H. Lawrence
Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
by Derek Walcott
William H. Murray
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy,
the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)
there is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that
would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues
from the decision, raising in one's favor
all manner of unforeseen incidents
and meetings and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
by William H. Murray
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Whatever you can do,
or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius,
power and magic in it.
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dawna Markova
I will not live 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.
by Dawna Markova
Galway Kinell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on the brow
of the flower,
and retell it in words and in touch,
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
by Galway Kinell (Loving Kindness)
A Sleep of Prisoners
The human heart can go the lengths of God
Cold and dark we may be......
But this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries cracks, begins to thaw.
The thunder is the thunder of the flows, the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now.
When wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us.
The longest stride of soul folk ever took.
Affairs are now soul sized, the enterprise is exploration into God.
But what are you waiting for?
It takes so many thousand years to wake.
But will you wake? For pity's sake.
by Christopher Frye
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
by Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that
is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand
or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness,
I can wait.
by Walt Whitman
Grounded
Lean into love. Even if it is
One stand of oat stalks in a tall grass prairie.
Lean anyway. Fall.
On hard and yielding clods of dried-up mud.
Let the ground cover you with earthy musty smells
Of its decaying stalks, dead seed heads
Returning to dirt. Earth turns, tips you up,
Face up to wind-washed clouds.
Wait, wait until they tinge pink
Fade and disappear into an indigo sky.
Lie uncovered in the dark
On that bare ground
Surrounded by grass whispers in an unfamiliar tongue.
Listen. Listen. Heart beating in the dust
Quivers with discovery. Call softly.
No, yell it out, yodel aloud-yes
Up tumbling, turning, leaping out yes--
You are not alone.
by Alison Peters
