Month: September 2019

Evening Poetry, September 4

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Since it’s our birthday week (my husband’s and mine), here is a birthday poem.

For Your Birthday

by John O’ Donohue

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day

The blueprint of your life

Would begin to glow on earth,

Illuminating all the faces and voices

That would arrive to invite

Your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,

Who loved you before you were,

And trusted to call you here

With no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you

Into becoming who you were meant to be,

Blessed be those who have crossed your life

With dark gifts of hurt and loss

That have helped to school your mind

In the art of disappointment.

When desolation surrounded you,

Blessed be those who looked for you

And found you, their kind hands

Urgent to open a blue window

In the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,

Your health, eyes to behold the world,

Thoughts to countenance the unknown,

Memory to harvest vanished days,

Your heart to feel the world’s waves,

Your breath to breathe the nourishment

Of distance made intimate by earth.

On this echoing-day of your birth,

May you open the gift of solitude

In order to receive your soul;

Enter the generosity of silence

To hear your hidden heart;

Know the serenity of stillness

To be enfolded anew

By the miracle of your being.

You can find this poem in To Bless the Space Between Us.

Evening Poetry, September 3

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The Little Turtle

By Vachel Lindsay

There was a little turtle.
He lived in a box.
He swam in a puddle.
He climbed on the rocks.

He snapped at a mosquito.
He snapped at a flea.
He snapped at a minnow.
And he snapped at me.

He caught the mosquito.
He caught the flea.
He caught the minnow.
But he didn’t catch me.

This was a favorite poem of both of my kids when they were little. You can find it in Eloise Wilkin’s Poems to Read to the Very Young.

Evening Poetry, September 2

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The Place I Want To Get Back To

by Mary Oliver

The place I want to get back to
is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness
and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me
they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting
on the ground like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;
and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way
I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward
and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years
I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can’t be repeated.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

You can find this poem in Thirst.

Evening Poetry, September 1

KimLeave a comment

Old Love and New

By Sara Teasdale

In my heart the old love  
Struggled with the new,  
It was ghostly waking  
All night through.  

Dear things, kind things  
That my old love said,  
Ranged themselves reproachfully  
Round my bed.  

But I could not heed them,  
For I seemed to see  
Dark eyes of my new love  
Fixed on me.  

Old love, old love,  
How can I be true?  
Shall I be faithless to myself  
Or to you?

You can find this in Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale.