Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too,

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,

If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

Edgar Allan Poe

Thou wast that all to me, love,

For which my soul did pine—

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine.
Ah, dream too bright to last!

Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise

But to be overcast!

A voice from out the Future cries,

“On! on!”—but o’er the Past

(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies

Mute, motionless, aghast!
For, alas! alas! with me

The light of Life is o’er!

No more—no more—no more—

(Such language holds the solemn sea

To the sands upon the shore)

Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,

Or the stricken eagle soar!
And all my days are trances,

And all my nightly dreams

Are where thy grey eye glances,

And where thy footstep gleams—

In what ethereal dances,

By what eternal streams.

Mary Oliver

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris,

it could be

weeds in a vacant lot,

or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate,

this isn't

a contest but the doorway
into thanks,

and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Agha Shahid Ali

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.

Philippe Jaccottet

Weight of stones,

weight of thoughts
Dreams and mountains

do not even balance
We still inhabit another world

Perhaps the interval.

Robert Bly

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days

And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed

The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense

Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!

See who will answer!

This is Call and Answer!”
We will have to call especially loud to reach

Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding

In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t

Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow

Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we’ve listened to the great criers—

Neruda,Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now

We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.

Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?

Hurry, cry now!

Soon Sunday night will come.

Hafez of Shiraz

The foods turned out by the factors of time and space are not all that great.

Bring some wine because good things of this world are not all that great.
The true kingdom comes to you without any breaking of bones.

If that weren't so, achieving the garden through your own neighbors wouldn't be all that great. In the five days remaining to you in this rest stop before you to go to the grave,

take it easy, give yourself time, because time is not all that great.

You Puritans on the stone floor, you are not safe from the tricks of God's zeal.

The distance between the cloister and the tavern we love is not all that great.

The name of Hafez has been well inscribed in the books, but in our clan of disreputables,

the difference between profit and loss is not all that great.

Tomas Tranströmer

Dawn comes.

The sparse tree trunks take on color now.

The frostbitten forest flowers form a silent search party

after something that has disappeared in the night.

I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living trade places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.

They said this mystery never shall cease:

The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.

~William Blake

Emmanuel Hocquard

The wind, when it flattens the grass under the wind, when it sparkles underneath in a dull light, the scarecrow is in the middle of the song. Both vertical and hollow on the earth, it pertains some of the air. It becomes that figure of the wind in the italicized fall of borrowed clothes collapsing into pieces. It bends right in the middle of what remains standing. Trees, a wall. He, a dug, a hollow idea, fright crossing through it.

Long ago, I was forbidden to have a slanting hand-writing. Hence why my body may have been tilting instead of my writing; hence why I remained bent amidst what stands erect, i.e. the letters of a Roman alphabet.

It is windy. The old grammar says that the wind is the real subject.

« He », the apparent subject. »