P O E T R Y
"Poetry is a language of the soul." Ann Ree Colton
Looking Into the Creek
One-Handed Basket Weaving, Rumi poems on the Theme of Work, Versions by Coleman Barks
The way the soul is
with the senses and the intellect
is like a creek.
When desire-weeds grow thick,
the intelligence can’t flow,
and soul-creatures stay hidden.
But sometimes your reasonable mind
runs so strong it clears
the clogged stream,
as though with God's hand.
No longer weeping and frustrated,
your being grows as powerful
as your wantings were before.
Laughing and satisfied, that masterful flowing
lets soul-creatures appear.
You look down,
and it's lucid dreaming.
The gates made of light
swing open. You see in.
Cat's Dream
Pablo Neruda, Translated by Alastair Reid
How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings-
a series of burnt circles-
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams.
I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
like a tiger's great-grandfather,
and would leap in the darkness over
rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.
Sleep, sleep cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
and the great ruff of your tail.
Five A.M. In The Pinewoods
Mary Oliver
I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking like two mute
and beautiful women toward the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream, though it could be.
Dream, Dream, Dream
Orese Fahey
Dream, Dream, Dream
Orese Fahey
Dream, Dream, Dream
No matter where you are
Dreamers distant destinations
Reach beyond the stars
Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream
Bring healing in the night
Reach beyond your limitations
Soaring in your flight
Dreams, Dreams, Dreams Dreams
Reveal our karma, seal
The Dharma into us at night
Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream
Time and Space are one
Eternal symbols strung upon a chain
Initiation
Working with the Masters once again
Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream
Dream Flowers
Kathleen Raine, from The Hollow Hill
In last night's dream who put into my hand
Two sprigs of verbena, culled from what sweet tree?
Your mother, it was told me, though I could not see her:
But to what daughter and by what mother,
By what Demeter to what Persephone given?
Was the hand mine that took those flowers
Given from one world to another?
There is a speech by none in this life spoken,
Yet we the speakers, we the listeners seem;
In that discourse, all signifies:
But what mind means the meaning that then is known?
Flowers of the earth grow out of mystery
From the deep loam of what has been
The past rises up in their life-stream
On whose surface images form and re-form;
But dreams rise up from a deeper spring:
Not from the past nor from the future come, but from the origin
These semblances of knowledge veiled in being.
What to Remember When Waking
David Whyte
From The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
“In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is the hidden gate to eternity.”
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through me and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”
Emily Brontë
