You Learn by Jorge Luis Borges

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After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth…
And you learn and learn…
With every good-bye you learn

The Pleasures Of Ordinary Life by Judith Viorst

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I’ve had my share of necessary losses,
Of dreams I know no longer can come true.
I’m done now with the whys and the becauses.
It’s time to make things good, not just make do.
It’s time to stop complaining and pursue
The pleasures of an ordinary life.
I used to rail against my compromises.
I yearned for the wild music, the swift race.
But happiness arrived in new disguises:
Sun lighting a child’s hair. A friend’s embrace.
Slow dancing in a safe and quiet place.
The pleasures of an ordinary life.
I’ll have no trumpets, triumphs, trails of glory.
It seems the woman I’ve turned out to be
Is not the heroine of some grand story.
But I have learned to find the poetry
In what my hands can touch, my eyes can see.
The pleasures of an ordinary life.
Young fantasies of magic and of mystery
Are over. But they really can’t compete
With all we’ve built together: A long history.
Connections that help render us complete.
Ties that hold and heal us. And the sweet,
Sweet pleasures of an ordinary life.

View with a Grain of Sand, by Wislawa Szymborska

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We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

Alone by Maya Angelou

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Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

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since feeling is first by e. e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

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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.

Remember How We Forgot by Shane Koyczan

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Remember how we forgot?
Remember how no one ever really died in the wars we fought?
Because each gunshot came from our finger tips
And we never really kept them loaded just in case
‘Cause each enemy was a friend and none of it was about oil, religion, or land
It was all just pretend
Remember how we used to bend reality
Like we were circus strong men
Like our imaginations were in shape then
Like we were all ninjas trained in the deadly art of “did not”.
Like “I totally got you”
“Did not”
Remember how we forgot?
Remember how our parents told us never to look directly into the sun
And how we were their sun
And so we never looked directly into the mirror, in fear that we would go blind
Remember how we used to find any old reason just to call someone we were crushing on
Like we could just pawn off our sense of embarrassment
Buy a chunk of courage that would last just long enough to have us askin em about math And stuff
And how stuff was just stuff
Like I heard you’re getting braces, now braces somehow were and still are kinda hot
Remember how we forgot?
Remember how we all caught mono and our folks would go, “oh the kissing disease”
And our first steps into gangstahood had us saying “mother please.”
Even though we’d never really kissed anyone
Even though we never did half the things we said we’d done
We just spun yarn like Rumpelstiltskin spun gold.
We told ghost stories never realizing we would one day ourselves become ghosts
Haunting the hallways of schools,
Breaking all the rules of silence in the library
But we had no chains to rattle
No voice to battle the fact that we had no vocal chords
We had only finger nails on chalk boards
We would scream, shout, and yell trying to tell ourselves what experience can teach is What no teacher taught
Remember how we forgot?
Once upon a time, we were young.
Our dreams hung like apples
Waiting to be picked and peeled
And hope was something needing to be reeled-in
So we can fill the always empty big fish bin with the one that got away
And proudly say that “this time, impossible is not an option”
Because success is so akin to effort and opportunity they could be related
So we took chances
We figure skated on thin ice
Believed that each slice of live was served with something sweet on the side
And failure was never nearly as important as the fact that we tried
That in the war against frailty and limitation
We supplied the determination it takes to make ideas and goals the parents of Possibility
And we believe ourselves to be members of this family
Not just one branch on one tree
But a forest whose roots make up a dynasty
So when I call you sis or bro
It’s not lightly
And when I ask you to remember
It’s because the future isn’t what it used to be.
So remember now
Pay tribute to every sacrifice laid upon the altar of somehow
For all the times
Somehow we overcame
Somehow we pushed on
Somehow we’ve gone the distance
And in going there we possessed the freedom to map the uncharted lands of any and Everywhere
We are unbound
Six feet above the underground where we will all one day rest
So until then
Test the limits
Test the boundaries and borders
As if the headquarters of potential lay just beyond the world’s edge
Let the belief that hope belongs to us all
Be the pledge you take to make the unachievable as inconceivable as the false fact hat We were never here
We were here
And our memories are as dear to us as every slow motion moment or held breath
So remember every instance before death
Every first kiss, first dance, near miss, last chance, yes, no, maybe so
Let us go the distance once more
Let us remember all the moments that were and were not
Like the point is something we can get and what we can get is what we got
Because all we have are the times between the moments we connect each dot
So live and remember
Burn like an ember capable of starting fires
Like each moment inspires the next
Like memories are the context we put ourselves in
So that life becomes the next of kin we need to notify in case of a big bang or Extinction level event
Let now be our advent
Let us live like we meant it
Let us burn like we mean it
Because this world doesn’t give a shit if we end in a train wreck or a car crash
If our story ends with a dot or dash
If we were dust or ash
Because all we were is all we’ll be
And all we are is the in-between of so far, so good
So forget every would, could, or should not
Forget remembering how we forgot
Live like a plot twist exists now and in memory
Because we burn bright
Our light leaves scars on the sun
Let no one say we will be undone by time’s passing
The memories we are amassing will stand as testament
That somehow we bent minds around the concept
That we see others within ourselves.
That self-knowledge can’t be found on bookshelves
So who we are has no bearing on how we appear
Look directly into every mirror
Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story
And our story starts

“Hope” is the thing with feathers – (314) By Emily Dickinson

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.