When We Let Spirit Lead Us -- Alice Walker

When we let Spirit

Lead us

It is impossible

To know

Where

We are being led.

All we know

All we can believe

All we can hope

Is that

We are going

Home

That wherever

Spirit

Takes us

Is where

We

Live.

Optimism -- Jane Hirshfield

From Given Sugar, Given Salt

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs -- all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Another Way to End a Relationship - Demetria Martinez

from Devil's Workshop

If you can't pull it up
By the roots,

Take it out

Of the sun, stop
Watering it.

I Don't Want Love - Demetria Martinez

from Devil's Workshop

    Not love, but something

That, when it loses its green,
Holds its form

Like ocotillo,
Long flutes of cactus

To build a ramada
At the threshold of my house.

My house, my home,
In my name.

When I love myself
As I loved you,

I will invite you in.

Thousands of Feet Below You - Alice Walker

From Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

Thousands of feet

Below you

There is a small

Boy

Running from

Your bombs.

If he were

To show up

At your mother's

House

On a green

Sea island

Off the coast

Of Georgia

He'd be invited in

For dinner.

Now, driven,

You have shattered

His bones.

He lies steaming

In the desert

In fifty or sixty

Or maybe one hundred

Oily, slimy

Bits.

If you survive

& return

To your island

Home

& your mother's

Gracious

Table

Where the cup

Of lovingkindness

Overflows

The brim

(&

From which

No one

In memory

Was ever

Turned)

Gather yourself.

Set a place

For him.

Balance - Dorianne Laux

From What We Carry

I'm remembering again, the day
we stood on the porch and you smoked
while the old man told you
about his basement full of wine,
his bad heart and the doctor's warning,
how he held the dusty bottle out to you,
glad, he said, to give it away
to someone who appreciated
its value and spirit, the years
it took to settle into its richness
and worth. I'm watching again,
each cell alive, as you reach
for the wine, your forearm exposed
below the rolled sleeve, the fine hairs
that sweep along the muscle, glowing,
lifting a little in the afternoon breeze.
I'm memorizing the shape of the moment:
your hand and the small bones
lengthening beneath the skin
as it tightens in the gripping,
in the receiving of the gift, the exact
texture and color of your skin,
and the old man's face, reduced
to its essence. That,
and the brief second
when both of you had a hand on the bottle—
the thing not yet given,
not yet taken, but held
between you, stoppered, full.
And my body is flooded again
with an elemental joy,
holding onto it against another day
in the unknowable future when I'm given
terrible news, some dark burden
I'll be forced to carry. I know
this is useless, and can't possibly work,
but I'm saving that moment, for balance.

Mother of Myths - V.B. Price

From Chaco Trilogy

We read of the Hopi (that’s all we can do)

that the dead are clouds,

that the dead rain down their souls on earth,

that life depends on their essence.

I felt a closing when my mother died,

felt the past had pulled itself from my life;

where she was

now nothing.

              Where did she go?

Is she anywhere more than a sorrow,

more than something gone?

              I am starving for new stories.

I have no heaven for her, no Elysium.

She isn’t waiting, in pillows and poppies,

for curtain calls from the gods,

              She is a memory

              I often forget

              has no memory itself.

But at Hopi

the dead never leave.

Rain is soul.

And the souls of Chaco

sill feed them.

All history’s in the sky,

the crops, their bodies.

              Any meal is a communion.

But my mother and I are as far apart

as I am from faith

in the Fall from grace.

She is like the canyon was on a Tuesday

7,000 years ago, or a Monday just last month,

a detail

in the history of time.

The canyon is

every day it was,

as the species is

every person it has been.

              But she

              is my mother,

              not a day in the shape of stone,

              and I don’t know where she is.

She is not in her bones,

not in her ashes I put in the waves.

She is an idea

I have not yet formed

like clouds unborn in the sea.

              I want her home with me. I want

              death, all death, to be

              a right proximity.

In Chaco, at least, I know

the canyon is

where the past remains.

              I know it is not

              only now.

So can I say

it is time’s common grave,

a mother of myths,

where death conceives, where memory

gives birth to the future?

Can I say she is somewhere there

waiting for doubt to leave?

             

Running to Wijiji - V.B. Price

From Chaco Trilogy

When you know who you are

you do who you are,

polishing a mountain

without a goal

(There is

nothing

more.

There is

nothing

other.)

At ten,

I did who I was;

I had no choice;

                     knowing and doing were not apart;

and where I was

was as much of myself

                               as what I did.

                               (Now is

                               a holy

                               place.)

Then years of trying

          and coming apart,

polishing stones

not the mountain

until

          the canyon

          wore me away

so I could see myself

                               singular as rocks,

                               as shadows, clouds

                               as cliff curves, edges,

                               water scars and swirls,

real as skin,

clear as sudden change,

                                         my body

                                         opening to the stars

                                         like Chacra Mesa

                                         on the skull of the world.

Now at 50,

I am the place again.

                               (The front

                               and the back

                               are part

of the same.)

At ten, the place

                    was a forest street

where I did who I was,

          biking to eskape

          tender failures,

sailing through arbors of high ponderosas,

winding like grassy streams

                     through Saturday morning sun.

When you are who you are

you do who you are.

                               (The sacred

                               and the profane

                               are sacred.)

At dawn near La Fajada,

breathing in

the rising light,

                    I am

ten and 50 all at once.

Running through fossil fields of corn,

running the cool space of canyon shade

as one runs memories through the gorge of time,

I see myself

                    in the shadow at my side,

bike rider, now

                               dawn runner

reaching Wijiji

                               at

the

moment

the sun

                    blooms

wildflower light,

          lightning white

over the canyon rim,

over the edge of my brain.

                                         Stunned by God

                                         again and again,

why should I doubt

                               any longer?

Coda

Now is
a holy
place.

There is
nothing
more.
There is
nothing
other.

The front
and the back
are part
of the same.

The sacred
and profane
are sacred.