Make use of the things around you.
This light rain
outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers,
these feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
the red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
drunkenly around in the kitchen . . .
put it all in,
make use.

~ from A New Path To The Waterfall (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989)

My beard is thick, my eyelids half cover
My eyes, as with those who know the value
Of visible things. I keep quiet as is proper
For a man who has learned that the human heart
Holds more than speech does. I have left behind
My native land, home, and public office.
Not that I looked for profit or adventure.
I am no foreigner on board a ship.
My plain face, the face of a tax-collector,
Merchant, or soldier, makes me one of the crowd.
Nor do I refuse to pay due homage
To local gods. And I eat what others eat.
About myself, this much will suffice.

~Selected Poems 1931-2004 (HarperCollins, 2006)

The sick wife stayed in the car
while he bought a few groceries.
Not yet fifty,
she had learned what it’s like
not to be able to button a button.

It was the middle of the day—
and so only mothers with small children
and retired couples
stepped through the muddy parking lot.

Dry cleaning swung and gleamed on hangers
in the cars of the prosperous.
How easily they moved—
with such freedom,
even the old and relatively infirm.

The windows began to steam up.
The cars on either side of her
pulled away so briskly
that it made her sick at heart.

~ from Collected Poems (Greywolf Press, 2005)

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

~ from 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, Selected by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005)

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

~ From Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins 2001)

Some days the words pass us,	
cars loaded with vacationers.
We are not going where they are going.
Soon as they top the hill	
we’ll be on the lost road again,
shouting once, then listening,
kicking a stone towards
anything like a tree.

Then the first language crawls back	
into the ears, humming.
A twig scratches two words	
in damp red earth:
NO   THOUGHT.
I’m looking for cedar stumps,	
a black calf in a blue field,
anything to report
that has nothing to do with my life.

I’m looking for the rusted skillet	
hunters left hanging on a branch.
Years after they sighed in firelight	
the tree claims their old iron
as another natural arm.

~ from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems 
(Far Corner Books, 1995)

the prayers where we do not wish others well.
for all the brilliant.  fetid.  noxious.  reasons.
the prayers we want to wash from the sky.   as soon as they 
  leave our imagination.  
the ones born with no bones.  so they leave no trace.
the harmful prayers.  we pray.
because
we have been harmed.

we are forgiven those too.

~ from Nejma (copyright 2014 Nayyirah Waheed)

May the light of your soul mind you.

May all your worry and anxiousness about your age
be transfigured.

May you be given wisdom for the eyes of your soul
To see this as a time of gracious harvesting.
May you have the passion to heal what has hurt you,
and allow it to come closer and become one with you.

May you have great dignity, 
And a sense of how free you are,
Above all, may you be given the wonderful gift 
Of meeting the eternal light that is within you.

May you be blessed; 
And may you find a wonderful love 
in yourself for yourself.

~from Walking in Wonder, Eternal Wisdom For A Modern World (Convergent, 2018)

I don't know where prayers go,
  or what they do. 
Do cats pray, while they sleep      
   half-asleep in the sun? 
Does the opossum pray as it      
   crosses the street? 
The sunflowers? The old black oak      
   growing older every year? 
I know I can walk through the world,      
   along the shore or under the trees, 
with my mind filled with things      
   of little importance, in full 
self-attendance. A condition I can't really      
   call being alive 
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,      
   or does it matter? 
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that's their way. 
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.  

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing 
just outside my door, with my notebook open, 
which is the way I begin every morning. 
Then a wren in the privet began to sing. 
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, 
I don't know why. And yet, why not. 
I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe 
or whatever you don't. That's your business. 
But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be      
   if it isn't a prayer? 
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

~ from A Thousand Mornings (The Penguin Press, 2012)

They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them, 
          so much frank need and want,
 so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring 
          entity and unity they make—
 her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her 
          laughter at his laughter,
 he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the 
          headiness of being craved so,
 she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again, 
          cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
 every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring 
          back in flame into the sexual—
 that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, 
          that filling of the heart,
 the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, 
         snorting  again, stamping in its stall.

~ from Flesh and Blood (Farrar/Straus/Giroux, New York, 1998)

Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for our pain’s sake!
Lips set smiling and face made fair
Still for you through the pain we bare,
We have hid till our hearts were sore
Blacker things than you ever bore:
Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for our pain’s sake! 

Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for our strength’s sake!
Light held high in a strife ne’er through
We have fought for our sons and you,
We have conquered a million years’
Pain and evil and doubt and tears—
Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for our strength’s sake! 

Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for your own sake!
We have held you within our hand,
Marred or made as we broke or planned,
We have given you life or killed
King or brute as we taught or willed—
Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for your own sake! 

Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for the world’s sake!
We are blind who must guide your eyes,
We are weak who must help you rise,
All untaught who must teach and mold
Souls of men till the world is old—
Let us in through the guarded gate,
Let us in for the world’s sake! 

~ This poem is in the public domain

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times? 

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know. 

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings. 

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of a year.

~ This poem is in the public domain

crumbling. It died of old age,
I tell you, like a man. We wept.
We had worn our time upon it, put
our arms around to touch fingertips
and we measured ourselves, our feelings
on the years. We made our calculations
pay, then. Now, the fears, age,
daily mathematics. The tree held
the green. Birds, squirrels, coons
made memory there until the day it fell.
They got out. It groaned for twenty minutes.
I tell you, it sighed as it bent,
its branches catching the dull fall,
the soft turning in wet dissolution.
The body lay exposed: a gut of grubs,
a lust of hollowness. We wept,
as I say, more than it was called for.

~ from Good Poems for Hard Times, Selected by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2005)

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day 
When the last fires will wave to me 
And the silence will set out 
Tireless traveller 
Like the beam of a lightless star 

Then I will no longer 
Find myself in life as in a strange garment 
Surprised at the earth 
And the love of one woman 
And the shamelessness of men 
As today writing after three days of rain 
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease 
And bowing not knowing to what

~ from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by 
Czeslaw Milosz, (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996)

What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on,
		         
just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm 
 falling
      
toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes.
 
 

No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the 
 President's
                
a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're
	               
cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless.
 
 

I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers.
                     
I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears,
			          
my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind.
 
 

But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane,
	 
or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say,

			            
"I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen.
  

Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside
			             
I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, pulsing,
		        
each star so close to the next and yet so far away.
  

Oh, the stars. In lines and curves, with fainter, more mysterious
	              
designs beyond, and again, beyond. The longer I look, the more I see,
	        
and the more I see, the deeper the universe grows.

  

I have a long way to go, and I'm starting now --
				                    
out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside.   

~ from Swimming with a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008)

We have a beautiful
mother 
Her hills 
are buffaloes 
Her buffaloes 
hills. 

We have a beautiful 
mother 
Her oceans 
are wombs 
Her wombs 
oceans. 

We have a beautiful 
mother 
Her teeth 
the white stones 
at the edge 
of the water 
the summer 
grasses 
her plentiful 
hair. 

We have a beautiful 
mother 
Her green lap 
immense 
Her brown embrace 
eternal 
Her blue body 
everything we know.

~ Her Blue Body Everything We Know (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991)

part 1

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn't Frank just slip on the ice,
didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted

didn't the night end,
didn't the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn't my body
rescued, wasn't it safe

didn't the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden
harrowed and planted- 

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted,
didn't vines climb the south wall

I can't hear your voice
for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is—

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth
safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,
weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

~ from Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)

 for Adélia Prado

Poets swagger up and down the shore, I’ll bet,
Wagging their hips in time to the raucous tide.
They tip back their heads and life sears a path
Down the throat. At night they dance, don’t they,
Across tiles that might as well be glass, or ice.
And if they don’t want to spend the evening alone,
They don’t. And if they want to wear snow-angels
Into the sheets of some big empty bed, that’s
What they do, until a dark form takes shape
On the ceiling overhead. Then they put on a robe
And kick around looking for some slippers.
When the poem finally arrives, it grins
And watches back with wide credulous eyes.

~From Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007)

A day comes 
when the mouth grows tired 
of saying “I.”

Yet it is occupied 
still by a self which must speak. 
Which still desires, is curious. 
Which believes it has also a right.

What to do?

The tongue consults with the teeth 
it knows will survive 
both mouth and self,

which grin—it is their natural pose— 
and say nothing.

~ from After, Poems (HarperCollins, 2006)

The mind of the day draws no attention;
It dwells within the silence with elegance
To create a space for all our words,
Drawing us to listen inward and outward.

We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.

Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.
 
So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one.
 
~from To Bless The Space Between Us (Harmony, 2008)