world

There May Be Chaos Still Around the World

Gill Washington George Santayana, Life, Poems, Spirituality , , , 0 Comment

By George Santayana

There may be chaos still around the world,
This little world that in my thinking lies;
For mine own bosom is the paradise
Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.
Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,
Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,
Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.
I heed them not; or if the subtle night
Haunt me with deities I never saw,
I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw
To hide their myriad faces from my sight.
They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe
A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.

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Lovers Think

Gill Washington Poems, Rumi, Spirituality, Sufism , , , 0 Comment

By Rumi

Lovers think they are looking for each other,
but there is only one search: wandering
This world is wandering that, both inside one
transparent sky. In here
there is no dogma and no heresy.
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future, Forget the future.
I’d worship someone who could do that.
On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say “There’s nothing ahead”,
there will be nothing there.
Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,
you don’t belong with us.
When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There’s no place like that anywhere in the world.

From The Essential Rumi

Coleman Barks with John Moyne

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LABOR NIGHT

Gill Washington Poems, Susan Dane , , , , 0 Comment

 

Susan Dane

Her world is upside down,
waiting for the baby.
She paces in the night
and sleeps the day.
She has cleaned every corner
of the house,
rearranged things twice,
then started on the garage.
Her belly so round,
so full of grace,
she cannot feel her legs
or in between them.
All this will have to wait.

For him there is nothing romantic
in the coming.
When there’s not one
more inch to spare,
one more ounce of air,
he’ll  push his way
into the new world.

For now,
there is still time
between the violent seconds.
She rises in the night,
to cook the peppers,
pops the stems and scatters seeds,
and marvels at their colors–
yellow, orange, red and green.
Christmas in the air!

But life starts with a fight,
a gritting of his will
and single-mindedness.
Necessity, the mother of invention.
For his first breath,
he parts her bone,
slow and hard
like the resurrection,
and  moving of the stone.