Hello y’all,
I’m so grateful for your generosity of spirit, your outreach, your care after last week’s post. I felt deeply held, and I’m honored to keep holding together here.
I had grand plans for what I wanted to share this week, and it all slipped past me, so while it ripens a bit more on the vine, I thought I’d offer you flowers instead. I’ve long been moved to read/share more poetry here from writers I adore. This feels like the right moment to pause and invite in the work of others to animate and enchant and inspire us.
Poetry is refuge. Poetry is survival. I think of Audre Lorde and one of my most favorite essays Poetry Is Not a Luxury, an essential read always, but especially in this moment.
“[Poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
Exchanging poetry is a love language. I often sit with a book of poetry beside me when writing so I can flip to a page when I’m stalled or stagnant instead of reaching for the black hole we call cellphones… well, specifically, Instagram.
Each of these poems shared today beams ripples of resonance across spacetime. They express how it feels to hold the immensity of being human. I will always be mystified by the unfathomable majesty of our universe. That we somehow exist amidst a million miracles, including the absurd fact that our moon is 1/400th the size of the sun but also 1/400th the distance from Earth meaning the moon and the sun appear to be the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination. This fact is made more ridiculous by another: the moon is gradually spiraling away from Earth, so we happen to be living within remarkable odds of perfect ratios, right now, in this precise moment of a celestial story unfolding over hundreds of millions of years. Finally, that it took 13.7 Billion years for the atoms to form as us, as trees, as birds, as all of life on Earth as portals of conscious awareness – the pinnacle of complex life in the known universe. It is wildly humbling to remember that we are intergalactic space travelers, we are orbiting amidst exponential, mystical entities about which we know so, so, so very little.
I hope these luminous transmissions remind you of your own divine starshine, of your precious place in the cosmos.
And I invite you to share any poem on your heart as an offering to the WCC community in the comments. Let’s spark a little exchange of nourishment right here, together.
Hubble Photographs: After Sappho
Adrienne Rich
It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die
walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something
more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
so out from us there’s no vocabulary
but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time
into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous
—beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death
or life, rage
for order, rage for destruction
beyond this love which stirs
the air every time she walks into the room
These impersonae, however we call them
won’t invade us as on movie screens
they are so old, so new, we are not to them
we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze
of our tilted gazing
but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them
Achieving Perspective
Pattiann Rogers
Straight up away from this road,
Away from the fitted particles of frost
Coating the hull of each chick pea,
And the stiff archer bug making its way
In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
Up the stem of the trillium,
Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
I try to remember that.
And even in the gold and purple pretense
Of evening, I make myself remember
That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering
Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting
And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up
Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests,
Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies
Of toad slush and duckweed rock,
40,000 years and the fastest thing we own,
To reach the one star nearest to us.
And when you speak to me like this,
I try to remember that the wood and cement walls
Of this room are being swept away now,
Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind,
And nothing at all separates our bodies
From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know
We are sitting in our chairs
Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space.
And when you look at me
I try to recall that at this moment
Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness
Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding
In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter
The widest arc of its elliptical turn.
Let there be new flowering
Lucille Clifton
let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end
The First Elegy (excerpt)
Rainer Marie Rilke
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic orders?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would vanish into that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry of my darkened sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals see clearly that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, that we can see again each day: there remains for us yesterday's street and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit that liked us so, and so stayed, and never departed.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not stay for--that longed-for, gentle, disappointing one,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
Ah, they only hide their fate between themselves.
Don't you know yet?
Throw the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.
Yes--the springtimes needed you deeply. Many a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin gave of itself to your hearing.
All this was their mission. But could you handle it?
Were you not always distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced, like a Beloved, came near to you?
(Where could you contain her, with all the vast strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)
But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough.
Those, you almost envied them, the forsaken, that you found as loving as those who were satisfied.
Begin again and again the unattainable praising; remember: the hero lives on; even his falling was merely a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
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Lacerations of light and dust