Poesi
Samlade dikter
I don’t want to touch you skin to skin. I want to touch you deeply, beneath the surface, where our real stories lie. Touch you where the fragments of our being are, where the sediment of things that shaped us forms the verdant delta of our human story. I want to bump against you and feel the rush of contact and ask important questions and offer compelling answers, so that together we might learn to live beneath the surface, where the current bears us forward deeper into the great ocean of shared experience. This is how I want to touch and be touched — through beings — so that someday I might discover that even the skin remembers.
~ Richard Wagamese, Embers
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into all the places where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
holy holy
~ Pesha Gertler
How love blows through the trees
This old Creek town appears empty except for the trees
And the story of how wind will come to clean
The earth, of the takers who took
And never give back.
One day, my grandfather used to sing
A fresh world will rise up
To take the place of the society
That did not love the earth
We lost ourselves when we crossed the river
My grandfather used to say.
He would smoke to the east, north, west, and south
And touch the earth and the sky.
He’d be standing in the kitchen
And there’d be no one listening.
Pass this love on, he’d say.
It knows how to bend and will never break.
It’s the only thing with a give and take
The more it’s used the more it makes.
My grandfather flew like smoke to the sky side of earth
He left us here in this place he blessed.
What stories he carried, what laughter-wrapped memory.
Now I’m standing in the kitchen
And I can hear him singing,
Sometimes it takes a while for us to hear.
Pass this love on, he’d say.
It knows how to bend and will never break,
It’s the only thing with a give and take
The more it’s used, the more it makes.
That love is the bridge that will cross the river home.
He’d be standing in the dark with no one listening.
How time blows steadily through the trees, how time blows steadily through the city.
Sing to this earth, sing, he sang.
~ Joy Harjo
The beginning of wisdom is the same as its attainment: wonder. The truest statement in the world is “ you never know.” There is always something to evoke wonder, to wonder about, because this world, this life, this universe, this reality is far more than just the sum of its parts. Even the slightest detail contains much more. The overwhelming awe and wonder we feel teach us more than we can ever glean or come to know of things. In the presence of that wonder., the head has no answers and the heart has no questions.
~ Richard Wagamese, Embers
The Well of Grief
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of greif,
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breath,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the dafrkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.
~ David Whyte
Nothing ever comes to rest. Everything keeps moving. Even stationary objekts are moving, though we do not see it. Change is constant and that means we are not the same from one moment to another either. Our cells are constantly in the process of changing. So if I am moving through a tough situation, there is no point trying to find “rest” so that I can cope. That is impossible. Instead, I can choose to change trajectory, to move in that direction that we lead me toward peace. THAT is always attainable.
~ Richard Wagamese, Embers
There are periods when you exist beyond the context of time and fact and reality . Moments when memory carries your buoyant beyond all things, and life exists as fragments and shards of being, when you see yourself as you were and will be again – sacred, whole and shining.
~ Richard Wagamese, Embers
Each human is a complex , contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peak above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.