Who Says Words With My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober.  Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

- RUMI

THE WHEEL REVOLVES

THE WHEEL REVOLVES

You were a girl of satin and gauze

Now you are my mountain and waterfall companion.

Long ago I read those lines of Po Chu I

Written in his middle age.

Young as I was they touched me.

I never thought in my own middle age

I would have a beautiful young dancer

To wander with me by falling crystal waters,

Among mountains of snow and granite,

Least of all that unlike Po's girl

She would be my very daughter.

The earth turns towards the sun.

Summer comes to the mountains.

Blue grouse drum in the red fir woods

All the bright long days.

You put blue jay and flicker feathers

In your hair.

Two and two violet green swallows

Play over the lake.

The blue birds have come back

To nest on the little island.

The swallows sip water on the wing

And play at love and dodge and swoop

just like the swallows that swirl

Under and over the Ponte \Tecchio.

Light rain crosses the lake

Hissing faintly. After the rain

There are giant puffballs with tortoise shell backs

At the edge of the meadow.

Snows of a thousand winters

Melt in the sun of one summer.

Wild cyclamen bloom by the stream.

Trout veer in the transparent current.

In the evening marmots bark in the rocks.

The Scorpion curls over the glimmering ice field.

A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon

Thunder growls far off.

Our campfire is a single light

Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls.

The manifold voices of falling water

Talk all night.

Wrapped in your down bag

Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids

Your breath comes and goes

In a tiny cloud in the frosty night.

Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise.

Ten thousand years revolve without change.

All this will never be again.

Mooji

Bukowski

Love of Millions

Some Ideas

Wherever I am,
the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness.
It does not believe
that I do not want it.
Now I understand why the
old poets of China went so far
and high into the mountains,
then crept into the pale mist.

~ Mary Oliver ~


When you no longer believe everything you think,
you step out of thought and see clearly
that the thinker is not who you are.

~ Eckhart Tolle ~


If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh ~


Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake…

~ Francis Bacon~

Kobayashi Issa

Dew

The world of dew is, yes,
a world of dew,
but even so 

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--”

Dew evaporates…
(tr. Kenneth Yasuda)

On the death of his child

Dew evaporates
and all our world is dew…
so dear, so fresh, so fleeting

Those Winter Sundays

“Those Winter Sundays”
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fire blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?