How did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its being,
Otherwise,
We all remain
Too frightened
Dante’s Inferno Canto I Translated by Seamus Heaney
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of.
How hard it is to say what it was like
in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense
and gnarled the very thought of it renews my panic.
It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.
But to rehearse the good it also brought me
I will speak about the other things I saw there
How I got into it I cannot clearly say
for I was moving like a sleepwalker
the moment I stepped out of the right way,
But when I came to the bottom of a hill
standing off at the far end of that valley
where a great terror had disheartened me
I looked up, and saw how its shoulders glowed
already in the rays of the planet
which leads and keeps men straight on every road.
Then I sensed a quiet influence settling
into those depths in me that had been rocked
and pitifully troubled all night long
And as a survivor gasping on the sand
turns his head back to study in a daze
the dangerous combers, so my mind
Turned back, although it was reeling forward,
back to inspect a pass that had proved fatal
heretofore to everyone who entered.
A Distant Relation by John Cooper Clarke
A family affair.
We get the picture,
We’re in it somewhere.
Permanent fixtures.
People who care.
Stranger beware,
This is a family affair
All of our yesterday’s.
Familiar rings,
I have to get away,
Its breaking my heart strings.
We have a drink,
On special occasions,
It makes me think,
About distant relations,
A family affair.
Always a mixture.
Of people in chairs,
Permanent fixtures,
With pressure to bear.
People who care.
This is a family affair.
Holiday snapshots.
Of you and myself.
Acting the crackpot,
Like everyone else.
The Bermuda shorts,
and the summer creations,
Bringing thoughts,
of those distant relations.
A family affair.
We brake ornaments, and get them repaired,
We bring up past events that hang in the air.
This is a family affair.
All our yesterdays.
Familiar rings.
I have to get away, from some surroundings.
Weddings and funerals, special occasions,
And all the usual distant relations.
A family affair.
Look at this picture.
We’re in there, look there.
Permanent fixtures.
People who care,
Whisper who dares,
This is a family affair.
The Journey By Alan King
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising
a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth,
every going to rest and sleep a little death.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
The diner’s nearly empty
when you both arrive – except for
the six or so other patrons and
a waitress who calls everyone “Hun”.
The fluorescent lights lick the Formica bar
and chrome stools, the black and purple beaten
booths and a straw-headed boy staring at you
over cold chicken strips, the ketchup
a sticky scab on his plate.
He reminds you of the little girls
the night before, running through a restaurant
in Berlin, Maryland, where you stayed at a hotel
known to be an antique –
its hardwood bathroom floors, the claw-
footed tub with its wraparound shower curtain,
the portraits of hoop-skirted women
twirling parasols, the prairie-style
wooden armoire closet.
The two girls, laughing as they ran through
the Drummers Cafe, stopped at the sight
of you and your wife, the only black people
in the restaurant that night.
When you remember the patrons’ darting
eyes at your wife’s dreadlocks, the way
the hostess smiled past you to the white family
she sat, while you waited,
when all around you the consensus
seemed to echo the nursery rhyme:
How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon,
you remember the loneliness
of feeling like the only one fighting for sanity
when the world makes you someone else.
You watch your wife rub her full moon
and talk to your daughter 27 weeks alive
inside her, knowing that each day is a little life,
each step towards progress a little birth,
even if the journey is full of off ramps,
like the one that brought you both
to a bright diner on your way home,
to the slurping straw that says
the blond boy’s savoring what’s left
of his chocolate shake before he sacks out
on the plush seat – his mom flipping through
a magazine, picking at her fries.
You watch him wrapped in his blue blanket –
as if sleep weren’t a little death; as if the world
weren’t a dark dream, haunted by a boogeyman’s
appetite for innocent things.”
The Book of Silence by Rasheed Copeland
We learned
from the book
of our fathers’ silence
how to speak
of young girls
in the way
old white men
speak of game
they’ve hunted
and mounted
on trophy walls.
The same book
that taught us
how to make
young girls
fake orgasms
and mourn their lost
virginities
while handling
little boy pride
with the delicacy
it requires.
This book,
void of chapters
on love,
on how to listen
to her skin’s soliloquy,
and on how to treat such
sacred treaty
of body and soul
less like a pillaging
and more like a litany
worth protecting,
is the book
from which I learned
how to both
break and be broken
without even knowing.
Bryant Park at Dusk by Geoffrey Brock
Floodlights have flared on behind and above
Where I sit in my public chair.
The lawn that had gradually darkened has brightened.
The library windows stare.
I’m alone in a crowd—e pluribus plures.
Far from a family I miss.
I’d almost say I’m lonely, but lonely
Is worse, I recall, than this.
Loneliness is a genuine poverty.
I’m like a man who is flush
But forgot his wallet on the nightstand
When he left for work in a rush,
And now must go without food and coffee
For a few hours more than he’d wish.
That’s all. He still has a wallet. It’s bulging.
It floats through his brain like a fish…
Money for love: a terrible simile,
But maybe it’s fitting here,
A couple of blocks from Madison Avenue
Where commodities are dear,
Where all around me, rich skyscrapers
Woo the impoverished sky,
Having sent on their way the spent commuters
Who stream, uncertain, by—
And as for this whole splurge of a city,
Isn’t money at its heart?
But I’m blathering now. Forgetting my subject.
What I meant to say at the start
Is that I noticed a woman reading
In a chair not far from mine.
Silver-haired, calm, she stirred a hunger
Hard for me to define,
Perhaps because she doesn’t seem lonely.
And what I loved was this:
The way, when dusk had darkened her pages,
As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,
Book open on her lap.
Perhaps she was thinking about her story,
Or the fall air, or a nap.
I thought she’d leave me then for pastimes
More suited to the dark.
But she is on intimate terms, it seems,
With the rhythms of Bryant Park,
For that’s when the floodlights came on, slowly,
Somewhere far above my need,
And the grass grew green again, and the woman
Reopened her eyes to read
Constellation by Andrés Montoya
there are the stars
and the sickle stare
of the moon
there are the frogs
dancing in the joy
of the ditch and the crickets
serenading everything
there are the trees
and the huge shadow
of the wind whispering
the old hymns of my childhood
and of course, there are the stars again.
winking at me like a curious woman.
i am learning to breathe
Song Out Here by Juan Felipe Herrera
if i could sing
i’d say everything you know
from here on the street can you turn around
just for once i am here
right behind you
what is that flag what is it made of
maybe it’s too late i have
too many questions where did it all come from
what colors is it all made of everything
everything here in the subways
there are so many things and voices
we are going somewhere but i just don’t know
somewhere
but i just don’t know
somewhere
do you know where that is i want to sing
so you can hear me and maybe you can tell me
where to go so you can hear me and just maybe
you can tell me where to go
all those hands and legs and faces going places
if i could sing
you would hear me and i would tell you
it’s gonna be alright
it’s gonna be alright
it’s gonna be alright it would be something like that
can you turn around so i can look into your eyes
just for once your eyes
maybe like hers can you see her
and his can you see them i want you to see them
all of us we could be together
if i could sing we would go there
we would run there together
we would live there for a while in that tilted
tiny house by the ocean rising up inside of us
i am on the curb next to a curled up cat
smoking i know its bad for you but
you know how it is just for once can you turn around
a straight line falling behind you it’s me i want to sing
invincible bleeding out with love
just for you
Please Call Me By My True Names By Thich Nhat Hanh
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow–even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.
I am a mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hinds. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion.
Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Compassion Camp 