Again.

September 4, 2019

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver, The Jouney

 

Dayle’s Community Cafe is on hiatus until September 18th.

Blessings.

Jai.

❥

The realm of waste.

The realm politics is the realm of waste.

I know that now all my own poems about the world’s suffering have been inadequate: they have not solved anything, they have only camouflaged the problem. And it seems to me

you live your life  like a candle in the wind

that the urge write a real poem about suffering and sin is only another temptation, because, after all, I do no really understand.

-Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas