Waiting for Quaker meeting
with a fence of white jasmine
behind me
and the
sun
a bit too warm
I hear from across
another wooden fence
opposite
the shout of the
morning-sobered plumber
stumbling from his
trailer:
“Alright! The first
…Tag: poetry
Abba Jacob and The Theologian
by Marilyn Nelson
Thanking him for spending
the entire afternoon
and half the dinner hour
discussing the various ramifications
of the essentially paradoxical nature
of faith,
the theologian interrupts her first
spoonful of lentils
to
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry, from The Mad Farmer Poems (2014)
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And
…Hidden Hearing
by Li-Young Lee
God slips His likeness of me under His pillow.
Morning grows cloudy, the house darkens,
and I know what the rain at the sill is saying:
Be finished with resemblances. Your lamp
hides the light.
What good am I?
by Bob Dylan, on Oh Mercy (1989)
What good am I if I’m like all the rest
If I just turn away, when I see how you’re dressed
If I shut myself off so I can’t
…but I do.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAIqk5KUBRQ?rel=0]
Chocolate Jesus
by Tom Waits
from the album Mule Variations (1999)
photograph by Richard Kalvar
I Dont go to church on Sunday
I Dont get down on my knees to pray
I Dont memorize
In Praise of Self-Deprecation
by Wislawa Szymborska (born 1923)
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without
Some Questions You Might Ask
by Mary Oliver
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep
Coyotes
by Mark Jarman
Is this world truly fallen? They say no.
For there’s the new moon, there’s the Milky Way,
There’s the rattler with a wren’s egg in its mouth,
And there’s the panting rabbit they will eat.
They