Wise words

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate;
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are we not to be!
From Nelson Mandela's inauguration speech

I'm not in this world to live up to other people's expectations.
Nor do I feel the world has to live up to mine.
Fritz Perls

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.
Don Juan Matus

Wise Poems

Walking around

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line;
underwear, towels, and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

Today is the day of crying in the kingdom.
Today my destiny is too much for me.

Pablo Neruda

Colours

When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don't fight it, my love is this fear.
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Everything Changes

Everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later
but what's happened has happened,
and poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again.

What's happened has happened.
Poisons poured into the seas
cannot be drained out again, but
everything changes. We plant
trees for those born later.

Cicely Herbert

Grief

Grief reached across the world to get me,
sadness carried me across seas and countries
to your grave
to offer the only gift I still can give you -
words you will not hear.

Fortune has taken you from me. You.
No reason, nothing fair.
I didn't deserve losing you.

Now in the silence since,
as is the ancient custom of our people,
I say the mourner's prayer,
do the final kindness.

Accept and understand it.
My head aches from crying.
Forever, goodbye.

Gaius Valerius Catullus

In love's dances

In love's dances, in love's dances,
One retreats and one advances.
One grows warmer and one colder,
One more hesitant, one bolder.
One gives what the other needed
Once, or will need, now unheeded.
One is clenched, compact, in-growing,
While the other's melting, flowing.
One is smiling and concealing,
While the other's asking, kneeling.
One is arguing or sleeping,
While the other's weeping, weeping.

And the question finds no answer,
And the tune misleads the dancer,
And the lost look finds no other,
And the lost hand finds no brother,
And the word is left unspoken,
Till the theme and thread are broken.

When shall these divisions alter?
Echo's answer seems to falter;
'Oh the unperplexed, unvexed time,
Next time, one day, one day, next time!'

ASJ Tessimond

Last night as I was sleeping

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvellous error! -
that a spring was breaking out
in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreampt - marvellous error! -
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreampt - marvellous error! -
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreampt - marvellous error! -
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Antonio Machado

Since there's no help

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done: you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
And thus so cleanly I myself can free,
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,
When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

Michael Drayton (C16th)

Sometimes I forget Completely

Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
energy everywhere. My story
gets told in various ways: A romance,
a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.

Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,
it will go around.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
are they part of some plan?
Friends, be careful. Don't come near me
out of curiosity or sympathy.

Jellaluddin Rumi (C11th, trans. Coleman Barks)

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, Muscatel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

The Journey

One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice-
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

Silence

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave - under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush'd - no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
And owls that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

Thomas Hood (C19th)

Another's Story

Just when it feels as if I might drown in my own tears
If I can but open my heavy, swollen, clouded eyes
My plugged ears
If I can open my cracked, stiff lips just enough
To bring this dry voice through aching lungs, and ask
I may be honoured with another's story.

We are the stories we tell of ourselves
Each one a rich tapestry
Of never-before seen colours
Seamless as sunlight
Woven of the thread of forever
The first stitch lost in the aeons of ancestry
And no final stitch possible
On the loom of our yearning.

The aching cold of our aloneness
Is warmed and rubbed alive
For just long enough
When for a moment the endless path is shared
And we walk together in humble wonder
Wearing the cloak of another's story.

Sophia Dunn, August 1999