re:cycling

"The Rider"

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

-Naomi Shihab Nye, 1998.

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 your 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."
-M.O.

"For They Shall Be Called Children of God"

I do not concern myself with things
too marvelous for me.

I pull young buckthorn after the rain
and watch the cranesbill fill in,

tie a clover around my child's wrist
to stop her from crying after a fall.

I do not concern myself with matters
too great. I skim the article

once or twice--rebel fighters,
refugees, tankers billowing smoke.

Shall I say each time my eyes wander
to the blue stars of lilac tumbling

from a jar on the table,
that I love those lilacs more?

I will die being no help to this man
curled around a broken IV

on a floor in Sri Lanka.
I would like to sink into his stare

and pray him through his nightmares.
But first I lie in the grass

and bury my face in the great skirts
of the sky, making peace

with the carpenter ants and the other
small brilliances of my life.

Tania Runyan.

The Nap

Red cap, red cap, red cap,
Snug on your curled hair.

Blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes,
All close eventually, lashes flutter.

Red plaid, red plaid, red plaid,
Loose round your soft waist.

Folded hands, folded hands, folded hands,
‘Cross your murmuring chest.

Blue jeans, blue jeans, blue jeans.
Sun-faded and torn on a barbed wire fence.

White shoes, white shoes, white shoes,
Mildewed laces dribbled in rain-puddles.

Lazy hammock, lazy hammock, lazy hammock,
Inspired the taciturn dreamer to sleep.

black oaks.

"Okay,

not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary, or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance &comfort.
Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays carp &whistle all day in the branches, without the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I`m pale with longing for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen &you can`t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage of their shoulders, &their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another -- why don`t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

&to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don`t want to sell my life for money, I don`t even want to come in out of the rain."

-M.O.

32578.

if you were me &i were you,
i`d tell you what i`d do:
i`d crumble up those silly rules,
&sail right back to you.

The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

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?

she put on happiness like a loose dress.

You dance inside my chest, where no one sees You,
But sometimes I see You
Rejoice.

Legacy.

"I promise you not a moment will be lost as long as I have heart & voice to speak & we will walk again together with a thousand others & a thousand more & on & on until there is no one among us who does not know the truth: there is no future without love."

[andnot just that romantic kind, either.]