Poems
I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life
Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
~ Mary Oliver
Saint Francis and the Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even 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 its
brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words
and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began
remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the
way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the
great broken heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
~ Galway Kinnell
Every child
Has known God.
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird.
But the God who only knows four words,
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come dance with me.
Come,
Dance.”
~ Hafiz
Women Live in Liquids
Women live in liquids,
blood, milk, tears
They know the tides by heart,
And recite the seasons.
Their babies float in water,
They are their babie’s ocean.
Women drip red drops
They have moist lips,
When lovers listen to women’s bodies
They hear the sea.
~ Duane Michals
The Dance
A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and somewhat stout, to be more courteous still, but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man she’s with get up to dance, her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained but confident ardor athwart his shoulder, drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and moving him with effortless grace into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all rhythmically solid music in this second-rate cafe,
that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed, nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for, but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence, which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world, that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.
~ C. K. Williams
My Father and the Figtree
For other fruits my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say, “See those? I wish they were figs.”
In the evenings he sat by my bed
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road and he saw a figtree.
Or, he tied his camel to a figtree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him, his pockets were full of figs.
At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about!” he said, “I’m talking about a fig
straight from the earth- gift of Allah!-on a branch so heavy it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest fattest sweetest fig in the world
and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)
Years passed, we lived in many houses, none had figrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said, but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water, let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is. Look how many things he starts and doesn’t finish.”
The last time he moved, I got a phone call.
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song I’d never heard.
“What’s that?”
“Wait till you see!”
He took me out to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
A tree with the largest, fattest, sweetest figs in the world.
“It’s a figtreesong!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
