Love's Growth

I scarce believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.

But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense,
And of the sun his working vigor borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is grown;
As, in the firmament,
Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.

If, as water stirred more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in time of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.

--John Donne (1571-1631), one of the premier English metaphysical poets, politician, writer, and Anglican priest

scripture reference: 1 John 3:16-24, Easter 4B

Sabbath 1998, I

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.


-- Wendell Berry (1934- ), American poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, and agrarian philosopher

Scripture reference: 1 John 3:16-24, Easter 4B

Highland Mary

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
         The castle o' Montgomery,
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
         Your waters never drumlie!
There Simmer first unfald her robes,
         And there the langest tarry:
For there I took the last Fareweel
         O' my sweet Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloom'd the gay, green birk,
         How rich the hawthorn's blossom;
As underneath their fragrant shade,
         I clasp'd her to my bosom!
The golden Hours, on angel wings,
         Flew o'er me and my Dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
         Was my sweet Highland Mary.

Wi' mony a vow, and lock'd embrace,
         Our parting was fu' tender;
And pledging aft to meet again,
         We tore oursels asunder:
But Oh! fell Death's untimely frost,
         That nipt my Flower sae early!
Now green's the sod, and cauld's the clay,
         That wraps my Highland Mary!

O pale, pale now, those rosy lips,
         I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly!
And clos'd for ay the sparkling glance,
         That dwalt on me sae kindly!
And mouldering now in silent dust,
         That heart that lo'ed me dearly!
But still within my bosom's core
         Shall live my Highland Mary.

--Robert Burns (1759-1796), national poet of Scotland. Today is Burns's birthday, and tonight is Burns' Night. 

This is one of three songs Burns wrote to honor Mary Campbell, whom he loved. It is sung to the tune of "Katherine Ogie." 

The bronze statue above was unveiled on 21 July 1896, the centenary of Burns' death, and made of bronze, was sculpted by David Watson Stephenson. It stands, facing southeast, on a round ashlar pedestal with an octagonal cap and base. It is inscribed Burns Highland Mary.

brae= steep hillside

drumlie=rough and muddy

birk=birch tree

The Sun Never Says

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth,

"You owe

Me."

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the

Whole Sky.

-- Hafiz, (Khwāje Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e), (1325-1390) the greatest of Persian poets and Sufi Muslim.

Christmas Affirmation: Love dwell within us

Let the love that shaped earth and heaven
dwell within us this Christmas.

Let the love that created humanity
dwell within us this Christmas.

Let the love that overcomes suffering and hatred
dwell within us this Christmas.

Let the love that causes us to rejoice with loved ones
dwell within us this Christmas.

Let the love that forgives and renews
dwell within us this Christmas.

Let the love that brings reconciliation after separation
dwell within us this Christmas.

Let the love that brings the blessing of peace
dwell within us this Christmas.

And may we share that peace
with all people near and far. Amen.



-- from Prayers for Christmas, posted on the Christian Aid (UK) website. 

Absence

I never eat sensibly when you’re away.
I make do with odd scraps of food
that don’t need heating up,
or nibble on a biscuit or two.
Under the pine trees
the dogs wait through wind and rain
for your return.

I fiddle with a poem,
searching for a true rhyme,
but settle for less.
If it gets any colder I may light a fire,
or I may not.
I take up a book of poems,
but after a few pages I put it down.

Far away the sea climbs the road
that you have taken,
and lazily climbs down,
leaving a white smear.
Under its plume of cloud,
Kapiti drifts towards Australia.
It will be another long day
before you return.

-- Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925-2009), New Zealand poet and playwright of Cook Islands and Pakeha ancestry.

Always on Waking

Always, on waking, I look out into treetops:
I lie beside you in the shimmering room
Where, whether summer morning, shell of dawn
Or dazed moonlight patterns leaves on walls
I wake to wide sky and the movement of treetops.

As the leaves flicker (thin scimitars of opaque
Dull green the eucalyptus bundles over her bark strips)
They become lucent; leaves lined with sunlight
With moonlight are no longer drab
But seem scimitars shining, are not now opaque.

While you are there I am nested among leaves;
As sparrows come each morning for breadcrumbs
So I look for your still face beside me;
Without your calm in the face of what wild storm
I am no longer nested, but desolate among these leaves.

—Ruth France, New Zealand poet

The Buried Life

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there's a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?

Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!

Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be—
By what distractions he would be possess'd,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity—
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being's law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but 't is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

-- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) British Victorian poet and critic, forerunner of modernist poets.

How It Is With Us, and How It Is With Them

We become religious,
then we turn from it,
then we are in need and maybe we turn back.
We turn to making money,
then we turn to the moral life,
then we think about money again.
We meet wonderful people, but lose them
    in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.


--Mary Oliver (1935-2019), best-selling American poet, author, and teacher,  from Dog Songs, 2013

If Feeling Isn't In It

You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .
                                                                              ----Howard Moss


Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.
Their bodies will shiver with happiness.
A simple walk in the park is just about
the height of contentment for them, followed
by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,
a place to curl up and sleep. Someone
to scratch them where they can't reach
and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.
Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen
and other bringers of bad news and will
bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell
fear and also love with perfect accuracy.
There is no use pretending with them.
Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy
or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed
or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.
They make no secret of themselves.
You can even tell what they're dreaming about
by the way their legs jerk and try to run
on the slippery ground of sleep.
Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.
They don't try to impress you with how serious
or sensitive they are. They just feel everything
full blast. Everything is off the charts
with them. More than once I've seen a dog
waiting for its owner outside a café
practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,
what if she doesn't come back this time?
What will I do? Who will take care of me?
I loved her so much and now she's gone
and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people
who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.”
And when she does come, what a flurry
of commotion, what a chorus of yelping
and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!
It's almost unbearable, this sudden
fullness after such total loss, to see
the world made whole again by a hand
on the shoulder and a voice like no other.

-- John Brehm (1955- ) American poet, editor, and teacher

Sonnet II (When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow)

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies—
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse",
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
   This were to be new made when thou art old,
   And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

-

- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) pre-eminent English playwright and poet

The Feathers, the Bones, and the Shells

The sound of my heart is ancient and true
And it sings like a thousand bells
For sorrow and grace, for my love of you
The Feathers, the Bones and the Shells

I try to believe wherever you are
There's a sky and a sea of blue
And someone you trust
Whose sheltering arms

Have finally comforted you
The touch of you hand still lives in my skin
Like a shadow I can't embrace
Wherever it ends is where it begins
Without ever leaving a trace

So you live in me and I live in you
And the rest is for love to tell
That nothing escapes
The wind blowing through
The Feathers, the Bones and the Shells

-- Beth Nielsen Chapman and Joe Henry, from Beth's album Deeper Still 

The Truth the Dead Know

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

--Anne Sexton (1928-1974), American Confessional poet and professor who struggled with mental illness and childhood abuse. She took her life at age 46.

A Hymn to Friendship

Somehow we manage it: to like our friends,

to tolerate not only their little ways
but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness:
"Oh, well," we smile, "it's one of his funny days."

Families, of course, are traditionally awful:
embarrassing parents, ghastly brothers, mad aunts
provide a useful training-ground to prepare us
for the pseudo-relations we acquire by chance.

Why them, though? Why not the woman in the library
(grey hair, big mouth) who reminds us so of J?
Or the one on Budgen's delicatessen counter
(shy smile, big nose) who strongly resembles K?

—Just as the stout, untidy gent on the train
reading the Mail on Sunday through pebble specs
could, with somewhat sparser hair and a change
of reading-matter, be our good friend X.

True, he isn't; they aren't; but why does it matter?
Wouldn't they do as well as the friends we made
in the casual past, by being at school with them,
or living nextdoor, or learning the same trade?

Well, no, they wouldn't. Imagine sharing a tent
with one of these look-alikes, and finding she snored:
no go. Or listening for days on end while she dithered
about her appalling marriage: we'd be bored.

Do we feel at all inclined to lend them money?
Or travel across a continent to stay
for a weekend with them? Or see them through an abortion,
a divorce, a gruelling court-case? No way.

Let one of these imposters desert his wife
for a twenty-year-old, then rave all night about
her sensitivity and her gleaming thighs,
while guzzling all our whiskey: we'd boot him out.

And as for us, could we ring them up at midnight
when our man walked out on us, or our roof fell in?
Would they offer to pay our fare across the Atlantic
to visit them? The chances are pretty thin.

Would they forgive us not admiring their novel,
or saying we couldn't really take to their child,
or confessing that years ago we went to bed
with their husband? No, they wouldn't: they'd go wild.

Some things kindly strangers will put up with,
but we need to know exactly what they are:
it's OK to break a glass, if we replace it,
but we mustn't let our kids be sick in their car.

Safer to stick with people who remember
how we ourselves, when we and they were nineteen,
threw up towards the end of a student party
on ethyl alcohol punch and methedrine.

In some ways we've improved since them. In others
(we glance at the heavy jowls and thinning hair,
hoping we're slightly better preserved than they are)
at least it's a deterioration we share.

It can't be true to say that we chose our friends,
or surely we'd have gone for a different lot,
while they, confronted with us, might well have decided
that since it was up to them they'd rather not.

But something keeps us hooked, now we're together,
a link we're not so daft as to disparage—
nearly as strong as blood-relationship
and far more permanent, thank God, than marriage.

--Fleur Adcock (1934- ), New Zealand-born poet, lecturer, librarian, translator, and commentator, from Poems 1960-2000.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                         i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

--e. e. cummings ( ) from Complete Poems: 1904-1962

Image: Heart, Soul, Rainbow, Gold, mixed media, Traci McCombs

"You Don't Know What Love Is"

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler

That's what the first line says
of the song I've been playing all summer
at the keyboard—trying to get my hands
around its dark, melancholy chords,
its story line of a melody that twists
up like snakes from melodic minor scales
that I've also been trying to learn, though
I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales.

Come to think of it, neither am I much
when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean.
Not that I haven't had my chances.
Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband,
half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby
than a grown man, the poet laureate
of the self-induced coma when it came to
doing anything for anybody but me.
"Now and then he took his thumb
out of his mouth to write an ode to
or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day."

That's what I imagined my ex-wife said
to our therapist near the end. She did say:
"It's all about Bill." She was right.
And suddenly it frightens me, remembering
how, at our wedding, our poet friends
read poems of (mostly) utter depression
to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love
had double-crossed our union, if strange
snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden
had hissed at us, and now I worry,
on your wedding day, if I'm not
doing the same damned thing . . . .

I haven't come to spring up and put my curse
on your bliss. Here's what I want to say:
You're young. You don’t know what love is.
And as the next line of the song goes, you won't
—"Until you know the meaning of the blues."
Darlings, the blues will come (though not
often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords
against your paradise. A little of that
you unwittingly got today, when it rained
and you couldn't be married outside under
the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard.
But paradise doesn't have to be structured
so that we can never reenter it. After
you've kicked each other out of it
once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically,
of course), teach yourself how to say
a few kind words to each other.
Don't stand there angry, stony.
Each of you let the other know
what you are feeling and thinking

and then it may be possible
to return to each other smiling,
hand in hand. For arm in arm,
you are your best Eden. Remember
the advice the old poet sang to you
on the afternoon of August 4, 2001,
the day you got married.
May you enjoy a good laugh
thinking of him and his silver thumb
now that you've turned the key
into your new life in the beautiful
Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

-- Bill Zavatsky (1943- ) poet, translator, musician, teacher, and editor, from Where X Marks the Spot

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                       Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

   Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

   Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                                                   The soul shrinks

   From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
                “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

   Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
   “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
                     keeping their difficult balance.”

— Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), second poet laureate of the United States

The Divine Image

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All Pray in the distress,
And to those virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear,
and Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form
In heathen, turk or jew.
Where Mercy Love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.


--William Blake (1757-1827), Romantic-era mystic, poet, and artist

Air and Angels

Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee, 

Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
          Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
          But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
          More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
          And therefore what thou wert, and who,
                    I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
             Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
          For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
          Then, as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
          So thy love may be my love's sphere;
                    Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

--John Donne (1572-1631), Anglican priest, poet, essayist, and founding member of the Metaphysical poets, whose feast day is today.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
     And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
     The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
     No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
     To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
     Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
     Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
     (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
     Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
     That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
     Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
     Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
     Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
     As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
     To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
     Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
     Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
     And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne (1572-1631), Anglican priest, poet, essayist, Dean of St. Paul's in London, and founder of the Metaphysical Poets, whose feast day is today.