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Poems

Unless there is already a thread and I missed it, how about a thread to share poems (Buddhist or otherwise)? From sonnets to haiku, originals or just personal favourites, just give credit where it is due.

Anyone?
Sabbynenkohai
«1

Comments

  • GlowGlow Veteran
    Rilke is one of my favorites as well. :)

    Another poet I like is Jorge Luis Borges.

    A History of the Night
    translated by Alastair Reid

    Through the course of generations
    men brought the night into being.
    In the beginning were blindness and dream
    and thorns which gash the bare foot
    and fear of wolves.
    We shall never know who fashioned the word
    for the interval of darkness
    which divides the two twilights.
    We shall never know in what century it stood
    for the starry spaces.
    Others began the myth.
    They made night mother of the tranquil Fates
    who weave all destiny
    and sacrificed black sheep to her
    and the rooster which announced her end.
    The Chaldeans gave her twelve houses;
    infinite worlds, the Stoic Portico.
    Latin hexameters molded her,
    and Pascal’s dread.
    Luis de León saw in her the homeland
    of his shivering soul.
    Now we feel her inexhaustible
    as an old wine
    and no one can think of her without vertigo,
    and time has charged her with eternity.

    And to think that night would not exist
    without those tenuous instruments, the eyes.

    riverflowStraight_ManJeffrey
  • @Glow - Yes, Rilke is one of my faves... I've only read a handful of Borges and I don't know why, because every time I do come across one of his poems he blows me away!
  • Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits,
    But our unfurnished eyes—

    ~ Emily Dickinson
  • chelachela Veteran
    Here is one of my favorite professor's poems, which she is reading in her lovely voice: http://katerina-accents.tumblr.com/post/45455922196/poet-donelle-dreese-reads-her-poem-farmers#_=_
    riverflow
  • GlowGlow Veteran
    I just discovered this page with what seems like an endless series of translations of Rilke's "Der Panther", one of my favorite poems of his. I've always been interested in the art of translation (which is the art of interpretation more than anything). Some of the renditions are... better than others, lol.
    riverflowStraight_Man
  • Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing;
    the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars—
    Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula
    and dry in their summer, they spiral
    Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future;
    nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
    Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages
    of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
    After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch
    of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
    Enormous repose after, enormous repose before,
    the flash of activity.
    Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths
    were prologue and epilogue merely
    To the surface play of the sun, the instant of life,
    what is called life? I fancy
    That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it;
    interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
    Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man
    finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence;
    Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken
    he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

    ~Robinson Jeffers


    [I'm afraid the line formatting won't come through on the forum - Jeffers, like Whitman, likes his lines super-sized!]
  • BeejBeej Human Being Veteran
    edited March 2013
    "In this way and that I tried to save the old pail,
    Since the bamboo strip was weakening, about to break
    Until at last the bottom fell out.
    No more water in the pail!
    No more moon in the water!"

    - poem by Chiyono, the nun, commemorating the moment upon which she attained enlightenment when her wood bucket collapsed and the water splashed onto the floor.
    riverflow
  • JasonJason God Emperor Arrakis Moderator
    edited March 2013
    riverflow said:

    Unless there is already a thread and I missed it, how about a thread to share poems (Buddhist or otherwise)? From sonnets to haiku, originals or just personal favourites, just give credit where it is due.

    Anyone?

    There probably is, but they tend to get lost in the ether. Here's a few of mine for anyone interested:

    1.
    "Samsara"

    In the window of the cafe
    I see
    haunting eyes
    as deep as the deepest ocean
    staring back at me.
    Their piercing gaze
    unfolding into tomorrow,
    reflecting back
    beginningless time.
    Portals
    revealing bits and pieces,
    glimpses and hopes,
    of things yet to come,
    that have already happened before.
    Peepholes into the tragic reality
    of my existential ouroboros.
    Drifting
    ceaselessly,
    like a wayward vessel
    hoping to find the safety of the other shore,
    I sail down the river of forgetfulness
    and crash
    over and over again
    into the rocky shores of beauty:
    the siren song of desire
    forever leading me
    astray.
    2.
    "Coffee at Bare Bones"

    Sitting at Bare Bones
    alone, in the brisk, winter afternoon.
    Coffee to my right,
    Dostoyevsky lurking around somewhere in my bag
    resting comfortably in the other chair.
    Ginger makes an occasional appearance from the back,
    chatting up the customers
    and intimidating them
    with her tattoos and handsome features.
    Short, black hair
    matching her black, button-up shirt.
    Less goth and more post-punk culinary, if you can imagine that.
    Thoughts turn to daggers
    like the tattoos on her arm,
    piercing through the melancholy of the moment
    and into the unknown future.
    Hope and fear, love and loss;
    life is such a holy and tragic thing.
    Souls forming and taking shape,
    like Fiddler Crab larvae
    carried upon the currents of choices,
    mistakes,
    and circumstances beyond their control.
    Washed far out to sea
    to sink or swim,
    or be eaten;
    the lucky ones being washed back into shore.
    Sometimes I feel like a leaf
    caught in the wake
    of souls bigger and more important than I.
    I rise and fall
    and am pushed aside by their passing.
    Always in a hurry
    with no place to go.
    But at least they'll get there on time.
    3.
    "......."

    Alone?

    Are we ever truly not alone?
    If a self is assumed, then how can we ever be as one?
    A self is separate from other.

    As one?

    Are we ever truly not as one?
    If a self is not assumed, then who is there to be alone?
    But self, by its very nature, is.

    Is what?

    Ephemeral? A useful fiction?
    Perhaps self itself is a sleight of hand too quick to catch.
    A phantom bent upon a goal.

    Perhaps.

    I ask myself, Why am I here?
    I answer back, Who is this 'I' I'm seeking to define?
    What is there worth clinging to?

    Nothing.

    Life is only a series of events.
    Happiness and sadness forever arising and passing away.
    If 'I' and 'mine' do not apply:

    "......."
    4.
    saffron-coloured robes
    amidst brilliant autumn leaves -
    a welcoming sight

    (This haiku was inspired by a picture of Ajahn Thanissaro and Phra Mike I took the last time they were in Portland. The picture is apparently too big to upload here, but you can check it out here if so inclined.)
    riverflowJeffreyInvincible_summerLucy_Begood
  • JayjayJayjay Veteran
    I have a page on Facebook called "Words From The Sky", not to advertise, but it is completely devoted to my own poetry, if anyone is interested! (:
    sova
  • I wrote this one last year:



    INTIMATIONS

    I am blind to faith
    in any eternity
    other than this moment:
    the river rushes past
    ephemeral hands.
    After all, a life can only
    bear so much world,
    and its myriad sorrows,
    and its myriad beauties,
    before ripening and falling
    into its own shadow:
    it is enough to know
    it is enough.

    Long after I am dead,
    long after you are dead,
    long after the wake
    of our history submerges
    into an ocean
    with no shore in sight,
    while the wingless soul,
    flimsy as it is, flickers
    before the vast All,
    only this unsung song,
    our simple love,
    endures
    beyond the frailty.


    ~Joshua Sellers
    Lucy_Begood
  • riverflowriverflow Veteran
    edited March 2013
    Oh, and this lovely gem:

    APOLOGY

    Holy being! I’ve often disturbed
    Your divine and golden repose;
    And you’ve heard much of life’s
    Deeper, more secret pains from me.

    Forget it, forgive me! Like the clouds drifting
    By the peaceful moon, I too pass away,
    And you rest, radiant once more
    In all your beauty, O sweet sweet light!

    ~Friedrich Hölderlin
    Jeffrey
  • Some haiku (I'm a haiku nut!):


    To the mountains,
    To the sky:
    The Heart Sutra.


    ~Santoka



    A poor box;
    four or five pennies,
    evening rain.


    ~Issa



    Lighting the light,—
    The shadows of the dolls,
    One for each.


    ~Shiki



    cold moon
    the gateless temple's
    endless sky


    ~Buson



    the sea grows dark
    a wild duck call
    faint white


    ~Basho
    Jeffrey
  • There is a poem called The Brook by Alfred Tennyson, I think it's just beautiful.

    One part in particular means a lot to me. My grandfather used to recite this verse in particular very frequently:
    "I chatter, chatter, as I flow
    To join the brimming river,
    For men may come and men may go,
    But I go on forever."
    riverflow
  • Also, I bought a beautiful little book called Zen Poems, edited by Manu Bazzanno. It contains a whole variety of poems and categorises them by season.

    Just to give some examples:
    Spring:

    Ice and water,
    Their difference resolved,
    Are friends again.
    - Yasuhara Teishitsu
    Summer:

    A sudden summer shower,
    The village sparrows
    Hang on in the grasses.
    - Yosa Buson


    Dragonfly on a rock -
    absorbed in
    a daydream.
    Santoka Taneda
    Autumn:

    Returning At Night
    Soughing, soughing, leaves in the empty wood;
    from the deserted village, one lamplight, dim.
    The traveller sees not a single shadow;
    Somewhere a dog barks at the cold stars.
    - Takuda Kodojin

    The grasses and the trees
    Change their colours;
    But to the wave-blooms
    On the brod sea-plain
    There comes no autumn.
    - Bunya Yasuhide
    Winter:

    Frozen snow
    adorns the naked tree
    flowers bloom in winter.
    - John Daide Loori
    riverflow
  • CHILDREN'S SONG

    We live in our own world,
    A world that is too small
    For you to stoop and enter
    Even on hands and knees,
    The adult subterfuge.
    And though you probe and pry
    With analytic eye,
    And eavesdrop all our talk
    With an amused look,
    You cannot find the centre
    Where we dance, where we play,
    Where life is still asleep
    Under the closed flower,
    Under the smooth shell
    Of eggs in the cupped nest
    That mock the faded blue
    Of your remoter heaven.

    ~R.S. Thomas
    Jason_PDK
  • A new haiku I wrote early this morning at the monastery:

    out of spring mist
    black branches
    & peach blossoms
    sova
  • Fresh haiku from Sunday morning--very happy with this one:

    gathered on the tip
    of each pine needle
    spring dew
    sovaDharmaMcBum
  • WILD GEESE

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things.

    ~Mary Oliver
  • When I was a child,
    A god often rescued me
    From the shouts and rods of men
    And I played among trees and flowers,
    Secure in their kindness,
    And the breezes of heaven
    Were playing there too.

    And as you delight
    The hearts of plants
    When they stretch toward you
    With little strength,

    So you delighted the heart in me,
    Father Helios, and like Endymion
    I was your favourite,
    Moon. Oh, all

    You friendly
    And faithful gods
    I wish you could know
    How my soul has loved you.

    Even though when I called to you then,
    It was not yet with names, and you
    Never named me as people do
    As though they knew one another.

    I knew you better
    Than I have ever known them.
    I understood the stillness above the sky
    But never the words of men.

    Trees were my teachers,
    Melodious trees,
    And I learned to love
    Among flowers.

    I grew up in the arms of the gods.

    ~ Friedrich Hölderlin
  • By the way, in the U.S., April is National Poetry Month!
  • Something I wrote last year:

    CANTUS FIRMUS

    An eternity before the rose and curious hands,
    Rain and ocean’s myriad rhythms, words and words,
    The silence of mountains, the astonished eye—

    An eternity after parched earth and parched breath,
    The sun’s final brilliance and decay into shadow,
    The forever unknown losses:

    The choir of stars hum the one undying song,
    An eternity heard once only—on the shore of whose ear?
    And the night breeze brushed against my face.

    ~Joshua Sellers
  • THE LAST DAY

    we will find ourselves surrounded
    by our kind all of them now
    wearing the eyes they had
    only imagined possible
    and they will reproach us
    with those eyes
    in a language more actual
    than speech
    asking why we allowed this
    to happen asking why
    for the love of God
    we did this to ourselves
    and we will answer
    in our feeble voices because
    because because

    ~ Lucille Clifton
  • WHAT IS THERE BEYOND KNOWING

    What is there beyond knowing that keeps
    calling to me? I can’t

    turn in any direction
    but it’s there. I don’t mean

    the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s
    silk song, but the far-off

    fires, for example,
    of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning

    theater of light, or the wind
    playful with its breath;

    or time that’s always rushing forward,
    or standing still

    in the same—what shall I say—
    moment.

    What I know
    I could put into a pack

    as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
    on one shoulder,

    important and honorable, but so small!
    While everything else continues, unexplained

    and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
    to follow a thought quietly

    to its logical end.
    I have done this a few times.

    But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
    in the middle of the world, breathing

    in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
    but breath and light, wind and rain.

    If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
    I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

    ~ Mary Oliver
    paigeJeffrey
  • Some of the most beautiful lines ever penned in English--the ending of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. I keep a copy of the whole poem in my desk at work:

    …We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.
    Through the unknown, remembered gate
    When the last of earth left to discover
    Is that which was the beginning;
    At the source of the longest river
    The voice of the hidden waterfall
    And the children in the apple-tree
    Not known, because not looked for
    But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
    Between two waves of the sea.
    Quick now, here, now, always—
    A condition of complete simplicity
    (Costing not less than everything)
    And all shall be well and
    All manner of thing shall be well
    When the tongues of flame are in-folded
    Into the crowned knot of fire
    And the fire and the rose are one.

    paige
  • A haiku:

    the cold night
    a strand of her hair
    on my pillow


    for Angie
    Christchurch
    (5 May 2007)
  • THE WAY IT IS

    There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
    things that change. But it doesn’t change.
    People wonder about what you are pursuing.
    You have to explain about the thread.
    But it is hard for others to see.
    While you hold it you can’t get lost.
    Tragedies happen; people get hurt
    or die; and you suffer and get old.
    Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
    You don’t ever let go of the thread.

    ~William Stafford
  • riverflowriverflow Veteran
    edited April 2013
    The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again.
    If your heart is pure, then all things in the world are pure.
    Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself,
    Then the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way.

    ~Ryokan
    (translated by John Stevens)
  • CHILDHOOD CALLS

    Come over, come over the deepening river,
    Come over again the dark torrent of years,
    Come over, come back where the green leaves quiver,
    And the lilac still blooms and the grey sky clears.

    Come, come back to the everlasting garden,
    To that green heaven, and the blue heaven above.
    Come back to the time when time brought no burden
    And love was unconscious, knowing not love.

    ~ John Freeman
  • Come, Come, Whoever You Are

    Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
    It doesn't matter.
    Ours is not a caravan of despair.
    Come, even if you have broken your vow

    a thousand times
    Come, yet again, come, come.
    Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi
    riverflowVastmindpommesetorangesrivercane
  • ELEGY: GODLEY HEAD, 2007
    For Angie

    The weight of water hurls itself against rock,
    retreats, re-gathers its strength, the sun shattered
    into innumerable shards the eye cannot follow.
    Stranded on an elusive shore, half-remembered,
    I climb with you into sunlight, up a narrow path,
    overlooking the ocean on a late summer day.
    Between us, the intimate silence we shared,
    the purest blue of sea and sky: every step
    in the course of time’s unfolding has led to this.
    But as two lines fuse together in Euclidean space,
    so they also pass and continue, the infinite point
    disappearing into the ever-receding distance.
    Our ghosts are evoked more imperfectly with each
    strain of music, straining for what cannot return.
    Was it even a memory we once shared?
    You, whom I have lost, have not escaped my hand
    to another place, but to another time dissolved
    by time, slipping away between numbered
    heartbeats, submerged in a ceaseless roar.
    You and I are but a blur in this landscape, our shadows
    stranded on a elusive shore, beyond salvage,
    where the ocean’s perpetuum mobile drowns
    a late summer day in a lullaby of forgetting, forgotten.

    ~Joshua Sellers
  • The sounds of the stream
    splash out
    the Buddha’s sermon
    Don’t say
    that the deepest meaning
    comes only from one’s mouth
    Day and night
    eighty thousand poems
    arise one after the other
    and in fact
    not a single word
    has ever been spoken


    Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
    Translated by W.S. Merwin
    and Soiku Shigematsu
    zombiegirl
  • zombiegirlzombiegirl beating the drum of the lifeless in a dry wasteland Veteran
    edited April 2013
    "next to of course god america i
    love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
    say can you see by the dawn's early my
    country 'tis of centuries come and go
    and are no more what of it we should worry
    in every language even deafanddumb
    thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
    by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
    why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
    iful than these heroic happy dead
    who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
    they did not stop to think they died instead
    then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

    He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

    -e.e. cummings
    riverflow
  • I love that one by e.e.!
  • zombiegirlzombiegirl beating the drum of the lifeless in a dry wasteland Veteran
    I'm a big fan of his. I used to have it memorized because I actually did a performance of it in high school. :)
    riverflow
  • ^^^ I can see that--that would work out nicely.
  • One of my favourite cummings:

    O sweet spontaneous
    earth how often have
    the doting

    fingers of
    prurient philosophies pinched
    and poked

    thee
    has the naughty thumb
    of science prodded
    thy

    beauty how
    often have religions taken
    thee upon their scraggy
    knees squeezing and

    buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
    gods
    but
    true

    to the incomparable
    couch of death thy
    rhythmic
    lover

    thou answerest
    them only with
    spring

    ~e. e. cummings
    zombiegirl
  • zombiegirlzombiegirl beating the drum of the lifeless in a dry wasteland Veteran
    One of my favorite things about e.e. is his use of the negative space on the page to actually make his work visual in addition to cerebral. Sadly, it doesn't always transfer with the html and the java of the internet.

    image
    image
    riverflowsovaDharmaMcBum
  • sovasova delocalized fractyllic harmonizing Veteran
    i love margaret atwood.

    "nobody is just one person"
    riverflow
  • I already posted Mary Oliver's poem "Wild Geese" -- here is a recording of her reading it:


  • ETERNITY

    He who binds to himself a joy
    Does the winged life destroy;
    But he who kisses the joy as it flies
    Lives in eternity's sun rise.

    ~ William Blake
    JeffreysovajaeThe_Dharma_Farmer
  • Being Memorial Day in the US, here are three poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, from his collection Dien Cai Dau...

    A BREAK FROM THE BUSH

    The South China Sea
    drives in another herd.
    The volleyball's a punching bag:
    Clem's already lost a tooth
    & Johnny's left eye is swollen shut.
    Frozen airlifted steaks burn
    on a wire grill, & miles away
    machine guns can be heard.
    Pretending we're somewhere else,
    we play harder.
    Lee Otis, the point man,
    high on Buddha grass,
    buries himself up to his neck
    in sand. "Can you see me now?
    In this spot they gonna build
    a Hilton. Invest in Paradise.
    Bang, bozos! You're dead."
    Frenchie's cassette player
    unravels Hendrix's "Purple Haze."
    Snake, 17, from Daytona,
    sits at the water's edge,
    the ash on his cigarette
    pointing to the ground
    like a crooked finger. CJ,
    who in three days will trip
    a fragmentation mine,
    runs after the ball
    into the whitecaps,
    laughing



    THANKS

    Thanks for the tree
    between me & a sniper’s bullet.
    I don’t know what made the grass
    sway seconds before the Viet Cong
    raised his soundless rifle.
    Some voice always followed,
    telling me which foot
    to put down first.
    Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
    against that anarchy of dusk.
    I was back in San Francisco
    wrapped up in a woman’s wild colors,
    causing some dark bird’s love call
    to be shattered by daylight
    when my hands reached up
    & pulled a branch away
    from my face. Thanks
    for the vague white flower
    that pointed to the gleaming metal
    reflecting how it is to be broken
    like mist over the grass,
    as we played some deadly
    game for blind gods.
    What made me spot the monarch
    writhing on a single thread
    tied to a farmer’s gate,
    holding the day together
    like an unfingered guitar string,
    is beyond me. Maybe the hills
    grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
    Again, thanks for the dud
    hand grenade tossed at my feet
    outside Chu Lai. I’m still
    falling through its silence.
    I don’t know why the intrepid
    sun touched the bayonet,
    but I know that something
    stood among those lost trees
    & moved only when I moved.



    FACING IT

    My black face fades,
    hiding inside the black granite.
    I said I wouldn’t,
    dammit: No tears.
    I’m stone. I’m flesh.
    My clouded reflection eyes me
    like a bird of prey, the profile of night
    slanted against morning. I turn
    this way—the stone lets me go.
    I turn that way—I’m inside
    the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
    again, depending on the light
    to make a difference.
    I go down the 58,022 names,
    half-expecting to find
    my own in letters like smoke.
    I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
    I see the booby trap’s white flash.
    Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
    but when she walks away
    the names stay on the wall.
    Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
    wings cutting across my stare.
    The sky. A plane in the sky.
    A white vet’s image floats
    closer to me, then his pale eyes
    look through mine. I’m a window.
    He’s lost his right arm
    inside the stone. In the black mirror
    a woman’s trying to erase names:
    No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.
    Jeffreyzombiegirl
  • Pleased with a new haiku I just wrote--just right outside the window here, in a brief moment of "impermanence gazing":

    each raindrop
    touches each leaf
    never the same
    zombiegirlanatamanDharmaMcBum
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