Each Thursday in January, Rundel has posted a poem I read aloud followed by a short explanation.
I can't isolate the readings, so to hear these, you would need to scroll down to the approximate date on the facebook link among the multiple announcements. Below are the poems and my comments.
Jan. 6: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Jan 13: Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur
Jan. 20: When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos
Jan. 27: 2 poems: Wake Up by Adam Zagajewski AND Gift by Czesław Miłosz
Wild Geese by 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 your 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.
This is one of my favorite poems on days I forget that being imperfect, and failure are very much part of being human. So is despair. What interferes with our basic human desire to love? She doesn’t give a sermon about this... only reminds us of our softer and thus perhaps more vulnerable sides. She reminds us, that not only are we not alone in feeling desperation, or feeling alone. We all belong in the web of things — and have the power of imagination to respond.
Three times, she repeats meanwhile... a wonderful word that reminds us that a mood, like a cloud in the wind, is not isolated, but simultaneous with all that could provide connection to our place “in the family of things” should we pay mindful attention.
Richard Wilbur:
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.”
I love this poem with the image of the air filling with spirited laundry, with the play on “wash” and the air “awash with angels”. Perhaps many don’t know about the system of pulleys for laundry, that allows you to hang clothes without needing to move the heavy basket of wet clothes— a rather miraculous image!
If you see a copy as you listen to the sounds emphasized by effortless alliterations... you will notice many l’s ! the o of o pen, window, soul, gallows, floating...and so much more.
In this skillful rendering of sounds, the soul implores all the cleansing that laundry represents... and makes a prayer for all who wear it... Paradox seems to float without effort... like the heaviest of nuns... and the play of their dark habits... in a pure floating! There is a levity in this poem that allows us to face whatever is involved with bitter love, whatever might knock us off balance.
When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
**
Too often, some associate giving as an obligation, sometimes a way to assuage guilt. Others see giving in the narrow context of charity. The title provokes a deeper look — if giving is all we have... wait— is that not a contradiction? Rios generously walks us through the many faces of giving. It is the “diamond in wood-nails” — another puzzling image combining the idea of a precious stone, which reminds me of the “diamond-head nail”, but nails made of wood.
There is something surprising about paradox, rather like the Japanese Koan, where a certitude of an answer is not the point, but rather the unexpected enlightenment to see things differently.
Giving as ALL... as all we have... as perhaps a way of life that connects us to a greater meaning.
**
Wake Up by Adam Zagajewski
Wake up, my soul.
I don’t know where you are,
where you’re hiding,
but wake up, please,
we’re still together,
the road is still before us,
a bright strip of dawn
will be our star.
Adam Zagajewski, a great Polish writer and translator born in 1945, passed away last year in Spring. I do not know the circumstances, but perhaps the sense an urgency in this poem as if the day Adam wrote this would be one of the few remaining to him. The image of a bright strip of dawn is indeed a powerful daily occurrence, whether clouds cloak it, or however the weather, and wherever you see day break.
What guides us? Perhaps you attach your own ideas to the traditional use of stars guiding sailors and night travelers, the three Kings en route to Bethlehem, slaves fleeing North to freedom.
Zagajewski was a beloved teacher as well as renowned contemporary poet. One of his courses taught the work of countryman, Czeslaw Milosz. Here is a short one by him, equally inspiring.
Gift by Czesław Miłosz
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
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