Tag: Poetry

Poetry in Motion – The Wild Iris


One that my friend Mike shared with me…which inspired a series of photographs from a walk around my neighborhood of irises.  Once again, thank you Mike for your words of comfort.  In particular, I like the part about finding my voice…  It goes hand in hand with some of Mark Nepo’s work, how we are alone, yet knitted together in a great mass of humanness.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Louise Gluck

Poetry in Motion – You and Art


I have a friend who is an avid reader of poetry.  From time to time, he shares prose with me that inspire and move me.  I thought I’d share a couple here from these past few months…  Thanks, Mike for sharing your world…for sifting through the pebbles and rocks and finding the gems for people like me who lack attention, but welcome the inspiration.

The first section speaks most to me…

 

You And Art

Your exact errors make a music  that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance, walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

—William Stafford