Wait – Galway Kinnell

Wait

by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

 

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Photo Rose Cook

Postscript ~ Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Rumi – The Guest House

The Guest House

by Rumi

Translated by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

One Breath by Lisa Kristine

 

One Breath       Lisa Kristine

 

When my mother was dying

We made a agreement that when she passed

I would have to find her in new ways

 

She said,

 

You can find me in the wind

Or in the scent of a rose..

 

You will find me in the decisions you make…

 

Help each other

 

We are all children of the Gods

And we all share one language

And we all share one breath.

 

 

photograph Rose Cook

In Tall Grass- Carl Sandburg

 

Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner —a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.   And I ask no better a winding sheet (over the earth and under the sun.)   Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.   Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey— who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets?   In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.   photo Rose Cook

Announcing – ‘Sightings’ a new book of poems from Rose Cook

 

 

a new, slim volume of poems: Sightings from Rose Cook

published by Grey Hen Press    £4 plus p&p    email info@greyhenpress.com

 

What some have said about the book:

Here are poems “bright as Lord Krishna’s hair’ that take great joy and delight in the wild-life of sea and shore. In an age of cynicism and depression over climate change these poems are a pure celebration of nature; to quote a line from her poem about building a stone wall, they are like “the heartings” that brim with “tumble and lustre”. A truly uplifting collection.

 Gill McEvoy (Rise pub Cinnamon Press)

 

There are poems here delightfully willing to see through the eyes of the creatures involved – whales, dogs, seals, fish, birds – while the human element is aware of itself as the inevitable record of vision.

And there are poems here which speak directly to the hidden in all of us; losses which remain on the inside brought to sight/light by Cook`s tender language and deft crafting.  

With the ‘white sheets’ on the washing line, Cook surrenders to sight, while that ‘single red shirt’ acts as a warning: Look out. And up, and everywhere, all the time, because it`s a good thing. Because it helps.

Sandra Tappenden (Speed pub Salt Modern Poets)