Photograph by Wieslaw Zieliński
The sun is perfect and you woke this morning.
You have enough language in your mouth to be understood.
You have a name, and someone wants to call it.
Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it.
If we just start there,
every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible.
If we start there,
everything, for a moment, is right in the world.
- Warsan Shire
Photograph by Jonny Armstrong
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
- Mary Oliver
From A Thousand Mornings
Photograph by Jumo Avilés
To love.
To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and
the vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch.
To try and understand.
To never look away.
And never, never to forget.
- Arundhati Roy
From The Cost of Living
Photograph by Jean Baptiste Courtier
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
the past, for if there is anything we must change
it is the past. To look back
and see another map.
Love enough to fill
a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,
a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,
a bit of chalk, a bit of
bone in ash.
All that is cupped,
all that is emptied
the rush of water from a pump,
a word spelled out
on a palm.
- Anne Michaels
From Correspondences
Photograph by Gary Briechle
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—
You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
- A.E. Stallings
Photograph by Pieter Henket
silently if, out of not knowable
night’s utmost nothing, wanders a little guess
(only which is this world) more of my life does
not leap than with the mystery your smile
sings or if (spiraling as luminous
they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,
less into heaven certainly earth swims
than each my deeper death becomes your kiss
losing through you what seemed myself;i find
selves unimaginably mine;beyond
sorrow’s own joys and hoping’s very fears
yours is the light by which my spirit’s born:
yours is the darkness of my soul’s return
–you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars
- e.e cummings
Photograph by Maja Daniels
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine;
My thoughts follow the exact same process.
- Virginia Woolf
Photograph by Cate Wnek
Carrying a day
is like carrying a mountain,
those endless small words
men use to guard
their helplessness.
Put your day down.
Come to the bank in the snow
wearing grace and pain,
the silence at the end of sentences.
Breathe the snow
and the sad odor of human dust.
All the roads are inside you,
even the desire
not to desire
brooding over your own horizon.
The innocents await you.
There is no one to wish farewell
except yourself in the orphaned dark.
- Terrance Keenan
From St. Nadie in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness
Photograph by Gil Rigoulet
should he head North
to her
climb into bed
with her
and would that make him soon forget
these morning nightmares
and random walks through woods
where he discovers nothing once again
but more of the same superstitions
traces of empty sagas
that don’t work for luck
or anything else
you can put your finger on
would running up there
to her
straight North on 39
erase all that
or just create a whole new set
of lawless circumstances
he’d soon regret
and set him wondering why he’d ever left
the sweet sweet sunny South
stay
he said to himself
in the voice of a man
in the voice of a man inside his chest
who told him in stern tones
things were already changing
for the worse
and it was far far better
to stay right there
sitting in his faded armchair
than to risk the road again
and all its bitter disappointments
stay
and tough it out
between the cattle and the moon
but what if she goes off
and gives up the ghost
of him
forever
falls off the face of the earth
somewhere
without even a kiss good-bye
that would have to be worse
than risking the highway
one last time
surely
that would have to be much much worse
stay
and watch the next set of possibilities
arise
and fall away
what have you got to lose
but everything
piece by piece
everything
day by day
- Sam Shepard
From Day Out of Days
Photographer unknown
Every summer I gather a few stones from
the beach and keep them in a glass bowl.
Now and again I cover them with water,
and they drink. There’s no question about
this; I put tinfoil over the bowl, tightly,
yet the water disappears. This doesn’t
mean we ever have a conversation, or that
they have the kind of feelings we do, yet
it might mean something. Whatever the
stones are, they don’t lie in the water
and do nothing.
Some of my friends refuse to believe it
happens, even though they’ve seen it. But
a few others-I’ve seen them walking down
the beach holding a few stones, and they
look at them rather more closely now.
Once in a while, I swear, I’ve even heard
one or two of them saying “Hello.”
Which, I think, does no harm to anyone or
anything, does it?
- Mary Oliver
From Blue Horses, 2014
Photograph by Alex Prager
At the top of the tallest building in the world
Sat the saddest man in the world
And inside the man
Was the loneliest heart in the world
And inside the heart
Was the deepest pit in the world
And at the bottom of the pit
Was the blackest mud in the world
And in the mud lay the lightest, loveliest, tenderest,
Most beautiful, happy angel in the universe.
- Michael Leunig
Photograph by Cathlin McCullough
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
- Philip Larkin
Photograph by Todd Wever
Oh why is heaven built so far,
Oh why is earth set so remote?
I cannot reach the nearest star
That hangs afloat.
I would not care to reach the moon,
One round monotonous of change;
Yet even she repeats her tune
Beyond my range.
I never watch the scatter'd fire
Of stars, or sun's far-trailing train,
But all my heart is one desire,
And all in vain:
For I am bound with fleshly bands,
Joy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;
I strain my heart, I stretch my hands,
And catch at hope.
- Christina Rossetti
Photograph by Ryan McGinley
There's more paradise in hell than we've been told
And every step we take we start from blue
Lie down and bleed into the waterhole
And so the night it will in time unfold
curled up inside my palm and sleeping too
There's more paradise in hell than we've been told
From your lashes tumble stars of gold
Starlashes
Little splashes of dew
spill across the world and through my soul
I'll call your tiny animals to the drinking hole
Little cat
Little bear
Little firehorse
Little kangaroo
There's more paradise in hell than we've been told
Little cat
Little firehorse with her shivering foal
Curled in my demon palm and dreaming too
And all across the world the night unfolds
And all across the night and through my soul
For every step we take we start from blue
Fresh tears bleed into the waterhole
There's more paradise in hell than we've been told
- Nick Cave
Photograph by Vivian Maier
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved's clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.
- Gregory Orr
from How Beautiful the Beloved
Photograph by Mathieu Pernot
There’s something dangerous
In being with good talkers.
The fly’s stories of his ancestors
Don’t mean much to the frog
I can't be the noisy person I am I
If you don't stop talking.
Some people talk so brilliantly
that we get small and vanish.
The shadows near that Dutch woman
Tell you that Rembrandt is a good listener.
- Robert Bly
from Morning Poems