EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT DIRT IS BENEFICIAL TO YOUR HEALTH
For Sandy

W. Patrick Tilcock

You already knew that. Reaching down,
Scooping and shaping with bare hands,
Absorbed and entranced with the dark,
Grainy soil that clings to your skin, you know
In your bones the boundless mystery
Reaching back thousands of years
In this patch of prairie where we have camped
For the past thirty-four. You know
There is a connection I miss
With my practical gloves
And long-handled tools, an ancient
Wisdom that seeps into your blood,
Carrying countless generations
Of grass-songs and oak-stories.
You touch an ancient prairie-fire
Of gratitude, a rough blessing
You carry in your blood as you work
On hands and knees,
Teasing out the roots of weeds,
Tending the delicate future.

Copyright 2007 by W. Patrick Tilcock

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PERHAPS THE WORLD ENDS HERE

Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human.
We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse.
We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and
crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

From How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975 - 2001, copyright 2002 by Joy Harjo, W. W. Norton & Company

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SNOW

Lucie Jane Thu Carmin

Flake by flake
falling softly,
covering the ground in a white blanket.
The trees whisper in the wind—
snow, snow, snow they seem to say.
Smoke is billowing from chimneys into the cloudless sky.
A soft whoosh of the wind—
I watch. I listen.
I look at the setting sun.
It goes down
like a melting ice cream cone.
Through the fog I can see the ocean lapping up the sand.
The moon rises.
I get into bed
as I hear the chimes of winter.
I shut my eyes
and go to sleep.

Copyright 2007 by Lucie Jane Thu Carmin

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DEPENDENCE DAY

John Daniel

It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks
or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag,
a day of staying home instead of crowding away,
a day we celebrate nothing gained in war
but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth
is democratic, touching everyone,
and the rain is democratic too,
how the strongest branches in the wind
give themselves as they resist, resist
and give themselves, how birds could have no freedom
without the planet’s weight to wing against,
how Earth itself could come to be
only when a whirling cloud of dust
pledged allegiance as a world
circling dependently around a star, and the star
blossomed into fire from the ash of other stars,
and once, at the dark zero of our time,
a blaze of revolutionary light
exploded out of nowhere, out of nothing,
because nothing needed the light,
as the brilliance of the light itself needs nothing.

From All Things Touched by Wind, copyright 1994 by John Daniel.

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TO THE BOOK

W. S. Merwin

Go on then
in your own time
this is as far
as I will take you
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours
all the time

of course you are not finished
how can you be finished
when the morning begins again
or the moon rises
even the words are not finished
though they may claim to be

never mind
I will not be
listening when they say
how you should be
different in some way
you will be able to tell them
that the fault was all mine

whoever I was
when I made you up

From Present Company, copyright 2005 by W. S. Merwin, Copper Canyon Press.

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CALL AND ANSWER: AUGUST 2002

Robert Bly

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 meliting?

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.

From My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, copyright 2005 by Robert Bly, Harper Perennial.

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CROSSING THE WILLAMETTE

W. Patrick Tilcock

This morning the river is full
and silt-brown, headlong.
As I watch from the bridge,
a cormorant dives and is gone.
The wide river keeps rolling up
its troubled dreams.
The black shape surfaces,
spreads its wings for the low,
skimming flight to the bank.

Sometimes it is our job
to dive into the murky,
rushing stream of chaos
to nourish our civilized,
air-breathing lives.

Copyright 2006 by W. Patrick Tilcock

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WE REGARD OURSELVES AS SERVANTS OF MEMORY

Barry Lopez

We regard ourselves as servants of memory. We will not be the servants of your progress. We seek a politics that goes beyond nation and race. We advocate for air and water without contamination, even if the contamination be called harmless or is to be placed there for our own good. We believe in the imagination and in the variety of its architectures, not in one plan for all, even if it is God’s plan. We believe in the divinity of life, in all its human variety. We believe that everything can be remembered in time, that anyone may be redeemed, that no hierarchy is worth figuring out, that no flower or animal or body of water or star is common, that poetry is the key to a lock worth springing, that what is called for is not subjugation but genuflection.

We trace the line of our testament back beyond Agamemnon, past Ur, past the roots of the spoken to handprints blown on a wall. We cannot be done away with, any more than the history of the Sung dynasty can be done away with, traveling as it does as a beam of coherent light far beyond our ken. We cannot, finally, be imprisoned or killed, because we remember and speak.

We are not twelve or twenty but numerous as the motes of dust lining the early morning shafts of city light. We are unquenchable and stark in the same moment that we are ordinary. We incorporate damage and compassion, exaltation and weariness-to-the-bone.

From “Apocalypse” which appears in Resistance, copyright 2004 by Barry Holstun Lopez, Alfred A. Knopf.

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I WOULD ASK YOU TO REMEMBER

Barry Lopez

I would ask you to remember only this one thing . . . The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.

From Crow and Weasel, copyright 1990 by Barry Holstun Lopez, North Point Press.

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ABOUT URSULA

W. Patrick Tilcock

My guardian angel has shining eyes.
Sometimes I think she is indifferent,
but she has deep, amber shining eyes.
I am probably not her only client.
She has clear, insistent eyes
and amazing, jagged brown lips.

There are morning visitations,
when she shoves her black
bearlike muzzle into my face
to lick the sleepiness from my eyes.
I want her to teach me about
being awake, about being present
and having vision, perhaps
about being big and shaggy
and infinitely tender.
I am her guardian angel.
She is not my only client.

Copyright 2005 by W. Patrick Tilcock

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WILD MERCY

Terry Tempest Williams

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

From Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, copyright 2001 by Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Books.

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OPUS FROM SPACE

Pattiann Rogers

Almost everything I know is glad
to be born—not only the desert orangetip,
on the twist flower or tansy, shaking
birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked
warbler nestling, head wavering toward sky,
and the honey possum, the pygmy possum,
blind, hairless thimbles of forward,
press and part.

Almost everything I’ve seen pushes
toward the place of that state as if there were
no knowing any other—the violent crack
and seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning
for luck toward birth by water.

And I’m fairly shocked to consider
all the bludgeonings and batterings going on
continually, the head-rammings, wing-furors,
and beak-crackings, fighting for release
inside gelatinous shells, leather shells,
calcium shells or rough, horny shells. Legs
and shoulder, knees and elbows flail likewise
against their womb walls everywhere, in pine
forest niches, seepage banks and boggy
prairies, among savannah grasses, on woven
mats and perfumed linen sheets.

Mad zealots, every one, even before
beginning they are dark dust-congealings
of pure frenzy to come into light.

Almost everything I know rages to be born,
the obsession founding itself explicitly
in the coming bone harps and ladders,
the heart-thrusts, vessels and voices
of all those speeding with clear and total
fury toward this singular honor.

Copyright 1997 by Pattiann Rogers, Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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EYE OF TIME

Ivan Doig

Of the three of us, it was my grandmother who preserved the photographs, as automatically diligent as if she were canning garden vegetables to carry us through the white worst months of winter. The albums even had their own sort of cellar: the dark and dust beneath the bed my father and I shared. Gee gosh, someday—the announcement always meant under-the-bed diving was being done, she was retrieving one or another album in which to put this year’s school picture of me as a startlingly pompadoured sixth-grader or one of my father in unbuckled overshoes beside his latest obstetrical miracle, triplet purebred Hereford calves, or of Grandma herself posed beside the Jeep with her beloved but fidgety sheepdogs, Spot and Tip, ambivalently atop the hood.
All said and done, a photograph is a knowing wink from the eye of time.

From “The Eye of Time, “ copyright 1983 by Ivan Doig.

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FAMOUS

Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
  which knew it would inherit the earth
  before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
  watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
  is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
  more famous than the dress shoe,
  which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
  and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, copyright 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye, Far Corner Books.

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A PRAYER BY THE TIGRIS
19 March 2003

Kim Stafford

Let me be light from the morning star,
the glimmer between worlds.
I am what you cannot see—at midnight
or noon. I am the child in war
putting my candle in a paper boat
at the call to prayer. My mother says
when I die I will be a secret.
Little boat, you are my sister
I put light in. Go find me
a place to be. Allah is great,
you are small. Go tell them
your brother is here. My mother,
my father, we—we are a secret,
we are a boat, we are a light.
We are the star that sees you.
What we lost will be you,
my mother says.

Copyright 2003 by Kim Stafford

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