If there’s any
possibility for enlightenment,
it’s right now, not at some
future time.
Posts Tagged → time
your time is running
Please
let me remind you,
who study the inconceivable:
Your time is running fast.
Don’t ignore
it.
try to praise the mutilated world
Try
to praise
the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads
of exiles.
You
must praise
the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts
and ships; one of them had a long trip
ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners
sing joyfully.
You
should praise
the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when
we were together in a white room and
the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to
the concert where music flared. You
gathered acorns in the park in
autumn and leaves eddied
over the earth’s
scars.
Praise
the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays
and vanishes and
returns.
know what came before time
Looked
at but not seen,
listened to but not heard,
grasped for but not held, formless,
soundless, intangible: the tao
resists analysis and defies
comprehension.
Its rising
is not about light,
its setting not a matter of
darkness. Unnameable, unending,
emerging continually, and continually
pouring back into nothingness, it is
formless form, unseeable image,
elusive, evasive unimaginable
mystery. Confront it, and
you won’t see its face.
Follow it and you
can’t find an
end.
Perceive its
ancient subtle heart, however,
and you become master of the moment.
Know what came before time, and
the beginning of wisdom
is yours.
from The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,
ebooks & apps of the Tao the Ching, I Ching,
Hua hu Ching, Wei wu Wei Ching,
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can now buy
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book.
don’t die
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
24th Poet Laureate of the United States