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Zen Calligraphy by
We shall not cease
from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot
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| William Stafford | Derek Walcott |
| You Reading This, Be Ready | Love after Love |
| A Story That Could Be True | |
| Yes | Lisel Mueller |
| The Little Ways the Encourage Good Fortune | In Passing |
| Jane Hirschfield | Portia Nelson |
| Secretive Heart | Autobiography in Five Chapters |
| De Capo | |
| Only When I am Quiet and do not Speak | Robert Bly |
| Watering the Horse | |
| Mary Oliver | |
| Spring | Billy Collins |
| Wild Geese | Shoveling Snow with Buddha |
| Charles Bukowski | Wendell Berry |
| No Help for that | The Law That Marries All Things |
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
William Stafford
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.
He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by –
you wonder at their calm.
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I'm a king.”
William Stafford
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out – no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
William Stafford
Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life
you will by overwhelmed:
you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you have things right in your life
but do not know why,
You are just lucky, and you will not move
in the little ways that encourage good fortune.
The saddest are those not right in their lives
who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self –
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.
William Stafford
What's this? This is an old toolshed.
No, this is a great past love.
Yehuda Amichai
Heart falters, stops
before a Chinese cauldron
still good for boiling water.
It is one of a dozen or more,
it is merely iron,
it is merely old,
there is much else to see.
The few raised marks
on it's belly
are useful to almost no one.
Heart looks at it a long time.
What do you see? I ask again,
but it does not answer.
Jane Hirschfield
Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.
Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.
Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.
Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.
You may do this, I tell you, its is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.
Jane Hirschfield
Only when I am quiet for a long time
and do not speak
do the objects of my life draw near.
Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug.
Hesitant even the towels,
for all their intimate knowledge and scent of
fresh bleach.
How steady their regard as they ponder,
dreaming and waking,
the entrancement of my daily wanderings and tasks.
Drunk on the honey of feelings, the honey of purpose,
they seem to be thinking,
a quiet judgment that glistens between the
glass doorknobs.
Yet theirs is not the false reserve
of a scarcely concealed ill-will,
nor that other, active shying: of pelted rocks
No, not that. For I hear the sigh of happiness
each object gives off
if I glimpse for even an instant the actual
instant –
As if they believed it possible
I might join
their circle of simple, passionate thusness,
their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,
the joyous gap in them where appears in us
the pronoun I
Jane Hirschfield
like a tuft of fire
a wheel of fire
a love knot
out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought
how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other
and I thought –
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings –
of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body
when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.
Mary Oliver
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
There is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
a space
and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest
times
we will know it
we will know it
more that
ever
There is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and
we will wait
and
wait
in that space.
Charles Bukowski
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
Lisel Mueller
How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen on the horse's mane!
Robert Bly
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over the mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?
But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside the generous pocket of his silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck,
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.
Billy Collins
1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.
The rain is free only
in falling.
The water is free only
in its gathering together,
in its downward courses,
in its rising into air.
2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.
3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.
It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.
4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.
5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows
Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.
Wendell Berry
Zen in American Poetry