A Ream of Paper

I have a ream of paper,
a cartridge of ink, 

almonds,
coffee,
a wool scarf for warmth. 

Whatever handcuffs the soul,
I have brought here. 

Whatever distances the heart,
I have brought here. 

A deer rises onto her haunches
to reach for an apple,

though many fallen apples are on the ground.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet, translator, and essayist, from Ledger

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw. 

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard. 

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled. 

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands. 

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough. 

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned. 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet, from Ledger (2020)

The heat of autumn

The heat of autumn

is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That's autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet and translator

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet, translator, and essayist, from Of Gravity & Angels, 1988

Scriptural reference: Romans 18:12-25

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.

-- Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet and editor


Image: The Survivor Tree at the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum

The Weighing

The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

-- Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American, from The October Palace, 1994

Lion and eland face off, from Africa Geographic.