"The Loon's Cry" Howard Nemerov

For sometimes, when our world is not our home
Nor we any home elsewhere, but all
Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold
We suddenly may seem in paradise
Again, in ignorance and emptiness
Blessed beyond what we thought to know:
Then on sweet waters echoes the loon's cry.

Howard Nemerov, "The Loon's Cry"

Howard Nemerov, Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Emily Dickinson on Pain

#1049

Pain has but one Acquaintance
And that is Death --
Each one unto the other
Society enough.

Pain is the Junior Party
By just a Second's right --
Death tenderly assists Him
And then absconds from Sight.

-------------------------------------------

#650

Pain - has an Elements of Blank -
It cannot recollect
When it begun - or if there were
A time when it was not -

It has no Future - but itself -
Its Infinite contain
Its Past - enlightenment to perceive
New Periods - of Pain.



The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Thomas H. Johnson Edition

Joseph Brodsky, "Closed to the Clash of Day's Discord"

Joseph Brodsky
"Lithuanian Divertissement: VII / The Dominicans"


Turn off the thoroughfare, then into
a half-blind street, and once inside
the church, which at this hour is empty;
sit on a bench, adjust your sight,
and, afterward, in God's whorled ear,
closed to the clash of day's discord,
whisper four syllable, soft and clear:
Forgive me, Lord.

Jane Kenyon - 'A Hundred White Daffodils'

"I think for Christmas I'll ask Santa for some tree work; I'll point and he can cut. It's not just more flowers I want, it's more light, more air for flowers, more sun for cheerfulness. A person gets her fill of shade-loving plants. She wants swaying hollyhocks, clove-scented pinks, and lavender plants as big as bushes. She doesn't care so much about conquering Moscow as she does about having a comely pear tree and a hundred white daffodils that glow after dusk against the unpainted boards of an old barn."

Jane Kenyon
"The Phantom Pruner" in A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, The Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem.

The Light is Everything -- Mary Oliver, "The Ponds"

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything-- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

(From, "The Ponds" in House of Light , 1990)

Chekhov - The Student -- The "Unbroken Chain"

The old woman had wept, not
because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was
near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was
passing in Peter's soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a
minute to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with
the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of
another." And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends
of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.