For a New Beginning, by John O'Donohue

Edvard Grieg - Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16, II
with Radu Lupu, piano

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.



from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

The Winter of Listening, by David Whyte

Maurice Ravel - Gaspard de la nuit: Trois poèmes pour piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand
Piano: Samson François

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.



poem from here

Dear Heart

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre

Played by the National Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor Leopold Stokowski



The sun does not make shadows - 

it calls, an invitation

to dance, 

shadow and light. 

It is time, dear heart

to remember you,

too,

can hold this

dance.

Invocation, by Jeanne Lohmann

Edvard Grieg - Peer Gynt Suite No.1, Op.46 - 1. Morning Mood 
with the Berliner Philharmoniker

Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,

to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue.
Turned toward the root of a single word, refusing

solemnity and slogans, let us honor what hides
and does not come easy to speech. The pebbles

we hold in our mouth help us to practice song,
and we sing to the sea. May the things of this world

be preserved to us, their beautiful secret
vocabularies. We are dreaming it over and new,

the language of our tribe, music we hear
we can only acknowledge. May the naming powers

be granted. Our words are feathers that fly
on our breath. Let them go in a holy direction.


from Between Silence and Answer (Pendle Hill Publications, 1994)

Your other name, by Tara Sophia Mohr

Mary Lou Williams - Gloria 
from her 1974 Zoning album

If your life doesn’t often make you feel
like a cauldron of swirling light –

If you are not often enough a woman standing
above a mysterious fire,
lifting her head to the sky –

You are doing too much, and listening too little.

Read poems. Walk in the woods. Make slow art.
Tie a rope around your heart, be led by it off the plank,
happy prisoner.

You are no animal. You are galaxy with skin.
Home to blue and yellow lightshots,
making speed-of-light curves and racecar turns,
bouncing in ricochet -

Don’t slow down the light and turn it into matter
with feeble preoccupations.

Don’t forget your true name:
Presiding one. Home for the gleaming.
Strong cauldron for the feast of light.

Strong cauldron for the feast of light:
I am speaking to you.
I beg you not to forget.


poem from Teaching With Heart: Poetry That Speaks to the Courage to Teach
thank you Aisha for the poem

Go to the limits of your longing, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Thomas Tallis - If Ye Love Me 

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.


from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God 
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Scraps of moon, by Denise Levertov

Gabriel Fauré - Cantique de Jean Racine

Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
 but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation
Here she seems to be talking to herself about
the shape of a life:
Only Once

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we'd do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did not happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don't
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body-halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

I want to write something so simply, by Mary Oliver

Pablo de Sarasate - Zigeunerweisen
with Sergey Krylov, violin

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself
out of your own heart
had been saying.


from Evidence: Poems (Beacon Press, 2009)
thank you Parker J. Palmer for the inspiration

Say not the struggle naught availeth, by Arthur Hugh Clough

Franz Liszt - Waldesrauschen (Forest Murmurs), Two Concert Études 
with Eileen Joyce, piano 

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

 If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

Rhapsody on a windy night, by T. S. Eliot

Béla Bartók - Out of Doors, Sz.81 Pt1 
with Maurizio Pollini, piano

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.


poem from PoetryArchive

Betrayal, by William Hathaway

Maurice Ravel - Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose)
with Martha Argerich and Lang Lan

It’s now all about money

about which poetry rarely reaches

transcendence. But love must still fester

even under that. Everyone I know

frets if poetry can still matter,

but what about love? It’s all become

too much for them, and they’re all

on the soma. It makes sense

with these pills when the someone

they thought they loved for years

by never thinking about it says,

“I don’t love you anymore,

but let’s stay friends in that mellow

woebegone way poetry now

sings without singing.” Of course,

they’re always asking “What is poetry?”

and then answering by saying

it’s what Boethius was thinking about

when they squished his head

until his eyes popped out,

or anything barbaric enough to get

everyone to stop eating for a bit

and reach for a moment past

a chatty moment. Sort of a solution

to awkward goodbyes. How money

becomes a sort of welcome

relief that defuses the poetry

charging tense moments. “Interesting,”

someone remarks between bites,

“to be right here in the moment

yet also out there watching

some once-in-a-lifetime sublimity

unfold, as if living as if already

dead.” As if standing in a dream far up

in the stars somewhere with Scipio

and seeing how little love matters,

or poetry for that matter,

considering how glory endures

only in glittering plunder. But best

of all, all of it stays just sort of

as if.

poem from Poetry (October 2009)