Some nights I stay up until dawn,
as the Moon does for the Sun.
I have lived on the lip of insanity,
waiting to know reasons
knocking on a door.
It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside.

~ Rumi

For the last five or six years (I am losing track), I have joined the global poetry slam in honor of Brigid, Goddess of Poetry, Healing, and Art.  The slam includes, not only poetry praises to our beloved Goddess, but offerings of poetry of all kinds.

As it happens, just yesterday, Poland’s Nobel Laureate Poet, Wislawa Szymborska crossed the veil. I am sure that Brigid has welcomed Her wry, brilliant daughter with loving arms.

It is in Ms. Szymborska’s memory, and in honor of blessed Brigid’s gifts of healing — even healing the horrors of war –  that I dedicate my Brigid Poetry Slam selection.  Blessed be.

The End and the Beginning

By Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012)
Translated By Joanna Trzeciak

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

Wislawa Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” from Miracle Fair, translated by Joanna Trzeciak.
Copyright © 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak.

The Gardener of Eden

from Packing Up for Paradise: Selected Poems 1946-1996
by James Broughton (1913-1999)

I am the old dreamer who never sleeps
I am timekeeper of the timeless dance
I preserve the long rhythms of the earth
and fertilize the rounds of desire

In my evergreen arboretum
I raise flowering hopes for the world
I plant seeds of perennial affection
and wait for their passionate bloom

Would you welcome that sight if you saw it?
Revalue the view you have lost?
Could you wake to the innocent morning
and follow the risks of your heart?

Every day I grow a dream in my garden
where the beds are laid out for love
When will you come to embrace it
and join in the joy of the dance?

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

by Mary Oliver 

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –

so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

As we approach the longest Solstice Night, the Mother Night, we give thanks and bless all that is dark. We heal with our intention “darkness” from its racial wounds and fear spells, and we give honor and praise to the Dark Mother, the Mother of us all. ~ B. 

A Prayer for Endarkenment

 by Dr. Frances Cress Welsin ©1996

THOU who art Blacker
Than a trillion midnights;
Whose eyes shine brighter
Than a billion suns.

THOU whose hair doth
Coil tighter than a
Million springs, radiating
All energy throughout
The universe.

We beseech THEE, ONE
And ONLY ONE

To give us total strength
to carry out THY will for the universe!

To establish JUSTICE on
planet Earth and live in peace.

The Tractorcade that paraded in support of the tens of thousands of anti-Walker protesters in Madison, WI last March. Did you know that over 30 tractors paraded in downtown Madison in solidarity? No, probably not. Like the most compelling stories of the American Awakening, it went unreported by the mainstream media.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry
(1934 – )

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XXIX

Rainer Maria Rilke
(from In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Alone

by Maya Angelou
From Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well by Maya Angelou.
Copyright © 1975 by Maya Angelou.

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Evening

Rainer Maria Rilke

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Psalm 49

From Earth Psalms, by Angela Magara

Listen and hear, hear and listen,
All people, all people of the world.
All the rich, all the poor,
All those at war, and those who walk in peace.

A message I have, a song to sing at my harp.
All wealth gathered in a heap cannot buy one day of life.
They who celebrate wealth await disaster.
Riches cannot heal your child, nor mend your heart of pain.

The foolish die,
And as easily the wise.
The rich pass to lie in the same dirt as the homeless.

Neither the houses,
nor the wealth,
nor the children,
nor the country
Of anyone, no matter how powerful will last forever.
All passes into oblivion
Nothingness is the end of all.

But the moment of now,
the hand of a child,
the eye of the lonely,
the whispered call of the ancient.
All these are an invitation to forever.

Love given,
like ripples on the water,
Changes everything in time.

Love poured out
will quench the thirst for eternity.
Each drop sweetens in its flow.
It molds life like limestone
Until a canyon grander than the Grand
Is created.

Listen and hear, hear and listen
The music of love, Siren of forever,
Rises and beckons us to melt into eternity
And live forever.