Moon Compass

A lovely little poem from Robert Frost. A gentle reminder of how precious tenderness can be...

Moon Compass

I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause
Between two downpours to see what there was.
And a masked moon had spread down compass rays
To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,
As if the final estimate were hers;
And as it measured in her calipers,
The mountain stood exalted in its place.
So love will take between the hands a face...

The Peace of Wild Things

So many distressing events are happening in the world these days. Perhaps the most tragic and far-reaching could be the collapsed BP drill in the Gulf of Mexico, still gushing after 36 days. Wendell Berry's poem offers some (temporary) solace.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I awake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's life may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Ideogram

A colleague at work has taken up Chinese calligraphy, which brought this poem by William Meridith to mind.

Ideogram

I am trying to describe to you a river at first light.
The water is glassy, under a scud of mist.
It is taking the color of the new sky
but the mist has something else in mind than pink -
a force of discoloration, it would have everything white.
On the far bank are serried low hills, tree-clusters,
occasionally the lights of a car.

This river I want you to see is being remembered.
I tell you this not to make us self-conscious
or conscious of words, but hoping to heighten
the peculiar vividness of a thing imagined.
I put no water-bird or craft on the surface:
the poem is absolutely quiet at about 5 A.M.
Rose-grey water slips away to the left and right, silkily,
upstream and downstream, just before sunrise,
just before we are called away,
you who don't know me, I who don't know you.

Soon it will be full light. We will blink this river away
and my talking to you, a stranger, as if I knew you,
as if our partaking a strange river at the edge of light
had been no impertinence - this will yield to another subject.
A river talked away, may be the new subject, or,
Mist burned off by the sun, an ancient, common figure,
a nearly dead metaphor, for enlightenment, and
it occurs to me now that someone may have already
accomplished this for you, hundreds of years ago,
someone deft with a brush, in China.

An ancestral poem for All Hallow's Eve (Samhaim)

by Daisy Zamora, Nicaraguan poet

Hand Mirror

After so many years
my grandmother Ilse returns
with her astonished
dark and melancholy eyes
and glances
- slender Narcissus -
at her small silver pool,
her magic oval,
her moon of cut glass
occupying this face
more and more hers

and less mine.