The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person —Cszelaw Milosz, from “Ars Poetica?” in The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 (The Ecco Press, 1988) Thank you, apoetreflects
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The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person

—Cszelaw Milosz, from “Ars Poetica?” in The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 (The Ecco Press, 1988)

Thank you, apoetreflects

Source: apoetreflects

i thank You God for this most amazing

i thank You God for this most amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

—E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962

From The Book of Hours I, 12

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
 
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
 
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
 
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
 
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
 
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

She Responded

The birds’ favorite songs
You do not hear,
For their most flamboyant music takes place
When their wings are stretched
Above the trees
And they are smoking the opium
Of pure freedom.
It is healthy for the prisoner
To have faith
That one day he will again move about
Wherever he wants,
Feel the wondrous grit of life -
Less structured,
Find all wounds, debts stamped canceled,
Paid.
I once asked a bird,
“How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?”
She responded,
“Love lifts
Me.”

—Hafez

From: The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Landinsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1999)

The Red Wheelbarrow  so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.—William Carlos Williams Photograph: William Carlos Williams with a few friends, unfortunately the photographer is unknown.
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The Red Wheelbarrow 

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

—William Carlos Williams

Photograph: William Carlos Williams with a few friends, unfortunately the photographer is unknown.

Claudia Jensen Dudley’s recent book: Poetry. Book + CD. WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON is a poetic and musical journey into the heart of a great question. Both intimate and epic in scope, it echoes Eliot’s Four Quartets, Tagore’s Gitanjali, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. But WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON stands unto itself. Three powerful stories unfold in narrative poetry and prose, concluding with eight “Canticles” (set to music on an accompanying CD, sung by Lori Hedrick Helfand) of lyric intensity. The seemingly unanswerable question of maya, or Illusion, resounds through them all. As in chiaroscuro painting, WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON uses shadow and light to create a third dimension. Its haunting rhythms, its riveting narratives evoke the ineffable in the silence beneath words. It calls us to face without fear both the mystery inherent in our personal journeys and the Mysterium Tremendum that is beyond telling. (from Browser Books Publishing) Here is a personal response to Claudia’s book by James George, a retired Canadian ambassador with a long-standing record of service concerning environmental issues. He is also the author of Asking for the Earth and The Little Green Book On Awakening: I have just read, avidly, your three-part poem extrapolating on the great insight of the ancient Egyptians that, if you know that you ARE everywhere at the same time, you can be conscious of God now. Of course this is also what St. Augustin is trying to express when he says famously that “there is nowhere that God is not.” But neither statement can be parroted mentally; it must be felt and felt deeply, in silence and awe. For here we are in front of the ubiquitous mystery of Life, of Consciousness.Your three stories take us by very different routes to the threshold of that delicate edge of human awareness, and thankfully without commentary. Beatrice did no less for Virgil, according to Dante. Your poems follow gracefully in their footsteps, supported by your music. With gratitude and love… *** Lastly, a poetic meditation on the art of writing by Claudia Jensen Dudley, courtesy of Works & Conversations: Writing in May Now that the early morning overcast has lifted, this day’s warmth, the scents of new growth everywhere, the jasmine on the fence, irises, the wet ground, fresh grass, are almost too much.  Too much to take in; so overwhelming to some unknown body in myself that they almost literally make my heart hurt. I wonder how I can ever digest this; the food is too rich.      Then I sit in front of this paper, trying to relate this, thinking there’s no way written words can possibly vibrate as the body does when touched by vibrating Nature in May. But what there is at times during the process of writing—it’s happening now—is a kind of hovering, a silence as the words emerge. This can happen because luckily, it takes more time to write these words than to speak them. It is during this time, this hovering, the almost leisurely space of time needed for words to flow into ink, that something extraordinary can happen. I can dwell in the true energetic echo of impressions as I write about them-allowing them go on working in me, in this stolen, sacred hovering, this waiting.       Then the words are something alive, really breathing. Maybe they even become a kind of holograph of the meadow, the trees, path, creek-which needs the writer for its full processing. I realize that this is why I write: for this truly alchemical process. —Claudia Jensen Dudley from “Why Write?”
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Claudia Jensen Dudley’s recent book: Poetry. Book + CD. WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON is a poetic and musical journey into the heart of a great question. Both intimate and epic in scope, it echoes Eliot’s Four Quartets, Tagore’s Gitanjali, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. But WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON stands unto itself. Three powerful stories unfold in narrative poetry and prose, concluding with eight “Canticles” (set to music on an accompanying CD, sung by Lori Hedrick Helfand) of lyric intensity. The seemingly unanswerable question of maya, or Illusion, resounds through them all. As in chiaroscuro painting, WATERS IN THE AFTERNOON uses shadow and light to create a third dimension. Its haunting rhythms, its riveting narratives evoke the ineffable in the silence beneath words. It calls us to face without fear both the mystery inherent in our personal journeys and the Mysterium Tremendum that is beyond telling. (from Browser Books Publishing)

Claudia Jensen Dudley

Here is a personal response to Claudia’s book by James George, a retired Canadian ambassador with a long-standing record of service concerning environmental issues. He is also the author of Asking for the Earth and The Little Green Book On Awakening:

I have just read, avidly, your three-part poem extrapolating on the great insight of the ancient Egyptians that, if you know that you ARE everywhere at the same time, you can be conscious of God now. Of course this is also what St. Augustin is trying to express when he says famously that “there is nowhere that God is not.” But neither statement can be parroted mentally; it must be felt and felt deeply, in silence and awe. For here we are in front of the ubiquitous mystery of Life, of Consciousness.Your three stories take us by very different routes to the threshold of that delicate edge of human awareness, and thankfully without commentary. Beatrice did no less for Virgil, according to Dante. Your poems follow gracefully in their footsteps, supported by your music.

With gratitude and love…

***

Lastly, a poetic meditation on the art of writing by Claudia Jensen Dudley, courtesy of Works & Conversations:

Writing in May

Now that the early morning overcast has lifted, this day’s warmth, the scents of new growth everywhere, the jasmine on the fence, irises, the wet ground, fresh grass, are almost too much.  Too much to take in; so overwhelming to some unknown body in myself that they almost literally make my heart hurt. I wonder how I can ever digest this; the food is too rich.
     Then I sit in front of this paper, trying to relate this, thinking there’s no way written words can possibly vibrate as the body does when touched by vibrating Nature in May. But what there is at times during the process of writing—it’s happening now—is a kind of hovering, a silence as the words emerge. This can happen because luckily, it takes more time to write these words than to speak them. It is during this time, this hovering, the almost leisurely space of time needed for words to flow into ink, that something extraordinary can happen. I can dwell in the true energetic echo of impressions as I write about them-allowing them go on working in me, in this stolen, sacred hovering, this waiting. 
     Then the words are something alive, really breathing. Maybe they even become a kind of holograph of the meadow, the trees, path, creek-which needs the writer for its full processing. I realize that this is why I write: for this truly alchemical process.

—Claudia Jensen Dudley from “Why Write?”

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times Come, yet again, come, come.” —Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkh, or Rumi (September 30, 1207 – December 17, 1273), was a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Photograph by Intension, “Mawlānā’s Tomb,” Konya, Turkey 2007
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“Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.”

—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkh, or Rumi (September 30, 1207 – December 17, 1273), was a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic.

Photograph by Intension, “Mawlānā’s Tomb,” Konya, Turkey 2007

Only mystery makes us live. Only mystery.
Federico García Lorca, “Le poète à New-York”