Amidst the Flowers a Jug of Wine by Li Po

Amidst the flowers a jug of wine, I pour alone lacking companionship.
So raising the cup I invite the Moon,
Then turn to my shadow which makes three of us.
Because the Moon does not know how to drink,
My shadow merely follows the movement of my body.
The moon has brought the shadow to keep me company a while,
The practice of mirth should keep pace with spring.
I start a song and the moon begins to reel,
I rise and dance and the shadow moves grotesquely.
While I'm still conscious let's rejoice with one another,
After I'm drunk let each one go his way.
Let us bind ourselves for ever for passionless journeyings.
Let us swear to meet again far in the Milky Way.

THOUGHT WORK by John O'Donohue

Off course from the frail music sought by words
And the path that always claims the journey,
In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm,
Creating mostly its own geography,
The mind is an old crow
Who knows only to gather dead twigs,
Then take them back to vacancy
Between the branches of the parent tree
And entwine them around the emptiness
With silence and unfailing patience
Until what has fallen, withered and lost

Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING by John O'Donohue

Unknown to us, there are moments
When crevices we cannot see open
For time to come alive with beginning.

As in autumn a field of corn knows
When enough green has been inhaled
From the clay and under the skill
Of an artist breeze becomes gold in a day.

When the ocean still as a mirror
Of a sudden takes a sinister curve
To rise in a mountain of wave
That would swallow a village.

How to a flock of starlings
Scattered, at work on grass,
From somewhere, a signal comes
And suddenly as one, they describe
A geometric shape in the air.

When the audience becomes still
And the soprano lets the silence deepen,
In the slowed holding, the whole aria
Hovers nearer, then alights
On the wings of breath
Poised to soar into song.

These inklings were first prescribed
The morning we met in Westport
And I was left with such sweet time
Wondering if between us something
Was deciding to begin or not.

Xenophanes Topples Traditional Poetic Conceptions of the Gods

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,

And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods

Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape

Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.

-- Xenophanes (570 – 480 BCE) - Greek philosopher, poet and social and religious critic - Writes in rebuttal to the "oral mythos" of Homer and Hesoid.

SEEING THINGS THEY WAY THEY REALLY ARE

THE SNOW MAN

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

On the occasion of Andrea's birthday

LOVE AFTER LOVE

by Derek Walcott

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.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US (1807) William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.