Still, by A. R. Ammons

Georg Friedrich Händel - Oratorio - Messiah, HWV 56, Hallelujah Chorus
performed by The English Concert & Choir

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!



from Selected Poems (2006)
thank you Roxana for the poem

What Great Grief Has Made the Empress Mute, by June Jordan

Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck - Mélodie, from Orfeo ed Euridice
with Ginette Neveu, violin

dedicated to the Empress Michiko and to Janice Mirikitani

Because it was raining outside the palace
Because there was no rain in her vicinity

Because people kept asking her questions
Because nobody ever asked her anything

Because marriage robbed her of her mother
Because she lost her daughters to the same tradition

Because her son laughed when she opened her mouth
Because he never delighted in anything she said

Because romance carried the rose inside a fist
Because she hungered for the fragrance of the rose

Because the jewels of her life did not belong to her
Because the glow of gold and silk disguised her soul
Because nothing she could say could change the melted
              music of her space
Because the privilege of her misery was something she could
              not disgrace
Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief
Because her grief required no imagination
Because it was raining outside the palace
Because there was no rain in her vicinity



poem from afropoets.net

Imagining you’d come to say goodbye..., by Jennifer Reeser

Johann Sebastian Bach - Cello Suite No. 2 Sarabande
with Pablo Casals


Imagining you’d come to say goodbye,
I made a doll of raffia and string.
I gave her thatch hair, and a broomstick skirt
of patchwork satin rags. Around each eye
I stitched thick lashes. Such a touching thing
she was! That even you could not debate –
impassive, undemanding and inert.
Yes, surely she’d cause you yourself to sigh.
Around her breast, I sewed a loden ring
to guard her cotton heart from being hurt,
then sat down in the fabric scraps to wait,
between the rafters and the furnace grate,
needle in hand, and never so aware
no craft on earth is master to despair.



poem from famouspoetsandpoems.com

Sympathetic Vibration, by Moya Cannon

Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky - Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35, III
with David Oistrakh

for Kathleen

'You never strike a note,
you always take the note.'

Did it take her many
of her eighty quiet passionate years
to earn that knowledge,
or was it given?

Music, the dark tender secret of it,
is locked into the wood of every tree.
Yearly it betrays its presence
in minute fistfuls of uncrumpling green.

No stroke or blade can release the music
which is salve to ease the world's wounds,
which tells and, modulating, retells
the story of our own groping roots,
of the deep sky from which they retreat
and, in retreating, reach -
the tree's great symphony of leaf.

No stroke or blade can bring us that release
but sometimes, where wildness has not been stilled,
hands, informed by years of patient love,
can come to know the hidden rhythms of the wood,
can touch bow to gut
and take the note,
as the heart yields and yields
and sings.



from Carrying the Songs (Carcanet, 2007)

This Sadness, by Susan Goyette

Pyotr Iliych Tchaikovsky - Pezzo Capriccioso
with Mstislav Rostropovich

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
and tire my useless sadness.
                                        - Anna Akhmatova

If I could change this sadness,
learn the touch of a potter,
I'd coax it into a thing of beauty,
something serviceable.

I imagine throwing it, wrapped in burlap,
into the harbour. Some unwanted cat
that will haunt me, one of its lives
as my grandmother, with fingers like pine roots
dropping dead needles into my eyes,
in another as my father with his hair on fire
and his steel-wool tongue.

But it's an alluring sadness
that calls with the wordless song of a child
and fills these nights with all the names
I can give to it.



from The True Names of Birds (Brick Books, 2000)

What Music, by Joy Harjo

Dmitri Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107, II. Moderato
with Mstislav Rostropovich (1959)

...  ...I would have loved you then, in
the hot, moist tropics of your young womanhood.
Then
...  ...the stars were out and fat every night.
They remembered your name
.............................................and called to you
as you bent down in the doorway of the whiteman's houses.
You savored each story they told you,
and remembered
...........................the way the stars entered your blood
...................................................................................at birth.
Maybe it was the Christians' language
.........................................................that captured you,
or the bones that cracked in your heart each time
you missed the aboriginal music that you were.
But then,
.............you were the survivor of the births
of your two sons. The oldest one hates you, and the other
wants to marry you. Now they live in another language
in Los Angeles
......................with their wives.
And you,
..............the stars return every night to call you back.
They have followed your escape
.....................from the southern hemisphere
.................................................................into the north.
Their voices echo out from your blood and you drink
the Christians' brandy and fall back into
.........doorways in an odd moonlight.
................................................You sweat in the winter in the north,
and you are afraid,
...........................  sweetheart.


M'Girl at Rhizome Cafe, Vancouver BC Coast Salish Territory, June 20 2009



poem from She Had Some Horses (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983)

Changing What We Mean, by Eloise Klein Healy

Richard Wagner - Walkürenritt, from Die Walküre, Act III
Conducted by Leopold Stokowski


Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new.
You redirect the conversation. A man
has entered it. Your therapist has given you
permission to discuss this with me, the word
you’ve been looking for in desire.
You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean

different things when we say it. I mean
the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new
beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire
to enter the world with a man
instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word
you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you

who have children to think of, you
who have put me in line behind them and mean
to keep the order clear. It’s really my word
against yours anymore in this new
language, in this battle over how a man
is about to enter this closed room of desire

we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire
isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you
say to me. Instead I learn a man
can protect you in a way a woman only means
to but never can, and my world is too new
when there’s real life out there, word

after word for how normal looks, each word
cutting like scissors a profile of desire—
a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new
or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you
and the world simultaneously, say what I mean
with my body, my choice to not be a man,

to be a woman with you, forget the man’s
part or how his body is the word
for what touch can contain, what love means.
If this were only about desire,
you say, I’d still desire you.
But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new

consequences emerge when a man and desire
are part of the words we hurl, you
changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.



poem from Poetry Foundation