Many times writing works like a mirror. Sometimes as we witness the stories of others, we find ourselves in there pain; in there joy; in there anger or confusion. In that moment, poetry becomes more than words that we see but the words that allow us to see ourselves in perfect light.
"Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding.
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings."
Rumi
"The Truth stands before me,
On my left is a blazing fire, and
On my right, a cool flowing stream.
One group of people walk toward the fire, into the fire,
And the other towards the cool flowing waters.
No one knows which is blessed and which is not.
But just as a just as someone enters the fire,
That head bobs up from the water,
And just as a head sinks into the water,
That face appears in the fire.
Those who love the sweet water of pleasure
And make it their devotion are cheated by this reversal.
The deception goes further-
The voice of the fire says:
“I am not fire, I am fountainhead,
Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.”
Rumi
"Come, come whoever you are!
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan
of despair.
Come,
come even if you have
broken your vows
a thousand times.
Come,
come yet again,
come!"
Inscribed at the tomb of Jelaluddin Rumi
“You can hold back from
suffering of the world,
you have permission to do so,
and it is in accordance
with your nature,
but perhaps this very holding back
is the one suffering
you could have avoided"
Franz Kafka
Love After Love
"The time will come, when with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life."
Dereck Walcott
The Journey
"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
