3418. Poetry: There Is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods

By George Gordon Byron [1788-1824] 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

3372. Poetry: Rising (In Honor of World Turtle Day)

By Jamie K. Reaser, May 23, 2020

Photo of the poet in 1985 while working with the Caretta Research Project on Wassaw Island, off the coast of Savannah, Georgia

Rising (In honor of World Turtle Day)

Paddling upward through layers of sand

with no knowledge of where to,                                  

crazed, or mightily faithful,

I don’t know and I refuse to judge

these hundreds of tiny flippers

in a frenzy to meet the Great Mystery,

and possibly their death, imminently.

I prefer to crouch here in awe.

What they don’t know, I know:

Ghost crabs, raccoons, birds, big birds,

fish, big fish. They, many of these

little naïve ancient ones, will be snacked upon

like salted popcorn. Nab, swallow, and gone

from this world they barely entered

and could not name.

Look how they rush to their destiny,

risking everything because that’s

what it is to live, though, yes, that’s the terrible secret

that we keep shushing back into the underworld,

and look how they, bellies skidding, go forward to reach

the one world they are made for, and how,

like an equal lover, that world, that mighty crashing world,

is reaching back to them in waves. And, they are met.

Gasp.

Isn’t this what you want?

The perfect fit. The equal lover. 

These precious scrambling things have got it right.

Standing in the sea oat-waving dunes, I’m absolutely sure of it.

How can the body, this body, any body

refuse to take the risk to rise?

3361. Poetry: Listening to Trees

By Jamie K. Reaser, Patreon, April 2020

Photo and copyright by Fred Murphy

Listening to Trees

“Shhhh,” quiet now, I implore you. 

The trees have something to say 

and I want to listen.

I want to listen and remember the language

of trees, the one we shared when we were

young and ancient. The one not influenced 

by today’s weather. The one that pulses 

through animal skin and animal bones.

There are things that trees know 

that I have forgotten. You too? 

How do we lose touch with 

what is most vital?

Just look at them:

how they can stay, 

how they turn their wounds

into works of art, 

how they are kind to each other 

even when their branches tangle.

I think our humanity

depends on trees.

3345. Poetry: Living

By Jamie K. Reaser, April 18, 2020

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser

Living

Everything that is me, cannot be
contained in one version of me,
cannot be contained at all,
really. There is so much in here 
that wants to get out into the world
and try on a thousand – maybe 
a million – ways of being. “What 
do you do?” Oh, so many things.
So many wonderful things.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author
Published in Conversations with Mary: Words of Attention and Devotion

3278. Poetry: I Bow Down

By Jamie K. Reaser, Conversations with Mary: Words of Attention and Devotion, 2019

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser. 

I Bow Down

I bow down.
I bow down to the sky that oversees
the liars and the truthsayers.
I bow down to the earth that conveys
the rich and the poor.
I bow down to the child that will lead
tomorrow and the child that leads
today and the child that must become
an angel because we won’t follow
the children otherwise.

What I stand for is that which
I bow down to:

that which says we’re not done
yet, there’s a lot more to learn
to love.I Bow Down

I bow down.
I bow down to the sky that oversees
the liars and the truthsayers.
I bow down to the earth that conveys
the rich and the poor.
I bow down to the child that will lead
tomorrow and the child that leads
today and the child that must become
an angel because we won’t follow
the children otherwise.

What I stand for is that which
I bow down to:

that which says we’re not done
yet, there’s a lot more to learn
to love.


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3277. Poetry: We Have Not Come to Take Prisoners

By Hafiz (Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī)

 We Have Not Come to Take Prisoners

We have not come here to take prisoners

But to surrender ever more deeply

To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world

to hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear, from anything

That may not strengthen

Your precious budding wings,

Run like hell, my dear,

From anyone likely to put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend

Those aspects of obedience of our house

And shout to our reason

"Oh please, oh please

come out and play."

For we have not come here to take prisoners,

Or to confine our wondrous spirits

But to experience ever and ever more deeply

our divine courage, freedom, and Light!

3261. Poetry: When the Dark Clouds

By Jamie K. Reaser,  "Truth and Beauty," 2019

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser

When the Dark Clouds

When the dark clouds lay thick
before you and the wind has
lifted your hair and taken it
someplace wild, do nothing.
Be no one known.
What has happened is moving
on to new horizons. What remains
are the desires withstood and
all the unfinishedness that will
see you through to the next day. 

© 2019/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Truth and Beauty" (a work in progress)
Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

3213. Poetry: The Humming

Photo: Kamran Nayeri

By Jamie K. Reaser, "Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life," 2012-19 

The Humming

I’m learning that there are bonds
of holy union
that cannot be undone
by mere mortals.

Swans know of them,
and dogs,
and children under the age of five.

And every other being on this planet.

When did we stop regarding
every breath as sacred,

and every eye we look into
and every hand that brushes against
ours?

I saw the filaments dancing today,
the ones that criss-cross lifetimes
and geographies.

They were humming a tune that I
have heard before in the natal waters.

It has only one note.

That’s all it needs.

When you remember it,
you remember me.

When I remember it,
I remember you.

It’s really quite amazing that we have lost
our way…

Really, it is.

The hummingbird has been trying to remind
us of our origin
while we take pity on it for the lack
of a song.

Oh my Beloved:

How I have forsaken you
in the austerity of these hurried times.

Were it not for the touch of sunlight
on a cold winter’s day,
I might have forgotten the endlessness
of your reach.

Always the bindings that unite us are there,
across them flowing an abundance of grace
and urging.

Longing is the form of that urging.

It is no vapid pain,
but a life blood of sentiment
through which the Holy
feeds us on dreams.

It is the umbilicus of love,
and when it is cut,

I’ve come to learn,
something dies.

In the story of every fallen god
and every unlived life
there is this truth,

and a deafening silence.

© 2012-2019/Jamie K. Reaser

Published in "Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life" 
Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

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3211. Poem: The Seed

By Jamie K. Reaser, "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World," March 17, 2019

The Seed

If I am the embryo of the seed,
let me call this in which I am planted
my Mother’s womb.

Here I am held.
Here I am nourished.
Here I am the possible human.

My umbilical chord is my root structure –
anchoring me to ancestral knowledge
and into the rich, organic detritus
of eroded lives
and savory fecal matter.

Everything that once was is a resource.

Everything.

Rain – the joy and grief of the world –
soaks and softens me.
Without it I become hardened, and
have no hope of intimacy with the light.

I must be cracked open to grow.

My limbs are the structures through which
my soul can reach, extending itself,
simultaneously longing to receive
and lamenting the ephemeral nature
of my gifts.

I show up because it’s how I pray.
I unfurl because it’s how I answer prayers.
I grow branches and leaves so that 
we have a place to meet.

I can bear flowers and fruit,
delicate, fragrant, and aphrodisiac sweet,
but not without having known relationship.

This is a place of co-creation.
Only the lonely believe in solitary forces
and the adversarial stance of their 
own mid-day shadow.

So, you see, these seeds of mySelf
that I place in your hands…

These are my way of saying, “I believe in you.”

I’m asking you to do the next planting.

(c) 2012-2019/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
Published by Talking Waters Press
Image: Pawel Jonica

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3164. Poetry: When You Stand

By Jamie K. Reaser, Bless This Day, January 2019

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser

May your feet, here now, know the support of the Earth, 
the mother of your mother’s mother’s mother and all 
the mothers before her.
May, in this light, you know the guidance of the Sun, 
the father of your father’s father’s father and all 
the fathers before him.
May you know the sisterhood of women who 
will embrace and hold space for your soul’s seed 
to break and who, in their own way, pray that because 
of this necessary breaking there will emerge and grow
something that serves others without demand 
of reciprocity.
May you know the brotherhood of men who stand 
beside you as you stand beside them, 
all familiar strangers, dedicated to protecting 
the ache of uncertainty, difference, and belonging 
so that we may liberate the fears that otherwise 
divide, diminish, and destroy otherness.
May you stand in the presence of my gratitude.

Thank you for showing me where blessings are needed.

© 2019/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Bless this Day" (a work in progress)
Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

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3160. Beloved Poet Mary Oliver, Who Believed Poetry 'Mustn't Be Fancy,' Dies At 83

By Lynn Nearby, NPR, January 17, 2019

Mary Oliver

Much-loved poet Mary Oliver died Thursday of lymphoma, at her home in Florida. She was 83. Oliver won many awards for her poems, which often explore the link between nature and the spiritual world; she also won a legion of loyal readers who found both solace and joy in her work.

Oliver got a lot of her ideas for poems during long walks — a habit she developed as a kid growing up in rural Ohio. It was not a happy childhood: She said she was sexually abused and suffered from parental neglect. But as she told NPR in 2012, she found refuge in two great passions that lasted her entire life.

She said, "The two things I loved from a very early age were the natural world and dead poets, [who] were my pals when I was a kid."

POETRY 

'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver

BOOK REVIEWS 

Mary Oliver Issues A Full-Throated Spiritual Autobiography In 'Upstream'

Oliver published her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, in her late 20s. She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But writer Ruth Franklin believes such recognition probably wasn't that important to Oliver. "I always had a sense of her as somebody who was just interested in following her own path, both spiritually and poetically," she says.

In a New Yorker article about Oliver's 2017 book, Devotions, Franklin wrote that Oliver wasn't always appreciated by critics, but she was still one of the country's most popular poets. And there's a reason for that.

"Mary Oliver isn't a difficult poet," Franklin says. "Her work is incredibly accessible, and I think that's what makes her so beloved by so many people. It doesn't feel like you have to take a seminar in order to understand Mary Oliver's poetry. She's speaking directly to you as a human being."

Oliver told NPR that simplicity was important to her. "Poetry, to be understood, must be clear," she said. "It mustn't be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now, they sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn't necessary should not be in the poem."

Oliver lived for many years in Provincetown, Mass., with the love of her life, the photographer Molly Malone Cook. There, she continued her habit of taking long walks, which often inspired poems. She wrote about one such walk in her poem "The Summer Day":

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Many of Oliver's poems are a joyful celebration of nature, but she also wrote about the abuse she suffered as a child and her first brush with death from lung cancer. Ruth Franklin says her work is infused with a deep spirituality. "The way she writes these poems that feel like prayers, she channels the voice of somebody who it seems might possibly have access to God. I think her work does give a sense of someone who is in tune with the deepest mysteries of the universe."

In her poem "When Death Comes," Oliver wrote this about the inevitable: "When it's over, I want to say all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement."

3159. Poetry: The Soft Animal

By Jamie K. Reaser, January 17, 2019

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser

Beloved poet, Mary Oliver, let go today. This poem is from my yet-to-be-published collection entitled, Conversations with Mary. It's a response to a line in her poem, Wild Geese. 

Journey well, Mary. Thank you for your guiding voice and spirit.

The Soft Animal

The soft animal of my body loves the deep
cup of the nest, but also the edge of the nest,
and the nothingness that is everything on the
other side. I am not built to love one thing or
one way, or limit myself to loving one world.
What is too small must be broken through or
left behind. At times, I’ve needed to do both.
Right now, right now, I just want to sit with
the last moment, the one, the last one, before
I completely let go.

(c) 2016-2019/Jamie K. Reaser (a work in progress)
From "Conversations with Mary"
Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

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3093. Poetry: Where I Live

By Jamie K. Reaser, Comming Home: Learning to Actively Love This World, November 20, 2018

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser

Where I Live

“Where are you going?” asked Crow.
“Home,” I answered.
“Is that a place?” asked Crow.

“It’s like a roost,” I said. “And,
a nest. A roost and a nest combined.
Well, it’s where humans do most
things,” I concluded.

“Oh,” he replied. “Then why are you
out here in the woods with us
every day?”

“Because,” I answered,

“This is where I live.”

© 2014-2018/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
Published by Talking Waters Press
Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

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3080. Poetry: When Men Sell Their Souls

By Jamie K. Reaser, 2015-2018

Photo: Jamie K. Reaser

“When men sell their souls,
where do the souls go?”

It’s an important question,
if we want to get them back.

And, we should, you know.
There are good reasons to do it.

~

I have a deep fondness for hollow
trees, they welcome so much to live
within them: a screech owl whom I
have known personally and, on my
farm, there is an old black locust filled
with thick honeycomb and sweet,
golden honey and so many bees that
the tree hums and vibrates under a
many-lined palm laid gently upon the
vertical-running bark. We keep each
other secret.

But, hollow people, they don’t let
the lovely things in.

~

I find myself spending more and more
time with trees.

© 2015-2018/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Conversations with Mary" (a work in progress)
Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser; Fine Art America

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