Happiness

BY JANE KENYON

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

From Open Closed Open By Yehuda Amichai

And there are days here when everything is sails and more sails,
even though there's no sea in Jerusalem, not even a river.
Everything is sails: the flags, the prayer shawls, the black coats,
the monks' robes, the kaftans and kaffiyehs,
young women's dresses and headdresses,
Torah mantles and prayer rugs, feelings that swell in the wind
and hopes that set them sailing in other directions.
Even my father's hands, spread out in blessing,
my mother's broad face and Ruth's faraway death
are sails, all of them sails in the splendid regatta
on the two seas of Jerusalem:

the sea of memory and the sea of forgetting.

A Poem by Claudio Bertoni (From movie Gloria, about a half hour in, Chilean original)




I’d like to be a nest if you were a little bird.

I’d like to be a scarf if you were a neck and were cold.

If you were music, I’d be an ear.

If you were water, I’d be a glass.

If you were light, I’d be an eye.

If you were a foot, I’d be a sock.

If you were the sea, I’d be a beach.

And if you were still the sea, I’d be a fish, and I’d swim in you.

And if you were the sea, I’d be salt.

And if I were salt, you’d be lettuce, an avocado or at least a fried egg.

And if you were a fried egg, I’d be a piece of bread.

And if I were a piece of bread, you’d be butter or jam.

If you were jam, I’d be the peach in the jam.

If I were a peach, you’d be a tree.

And if you were a tree, I’d be your sap…

And I’d course through your arms like blood.

And if I were blood, I’d live in your heart.

Sabbath Lie

BY YEHUDA AMICHAI

TRANSLATED BY GLENDA ABRAMSON

On Friday, at twilight of a summer day

While the smells of food and prayer rose from every house

And the sound of the Sabbath angels’ wings was in the air,

While still a child I started to lie to my father:

“I went to another synagogue.”

I don’t know if he believed me or not

But the taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue

And in all the houses that night

Hymns rose up along with lies

To celebrate the Sabbath.

And in all the houses that night

Sabbath angels died like flies in a lamp,

And lovers put mouth to mouth,

Blew each other up until they floated upward,

Or burst.

And since then the lie has been good and sweet on my tongue

And since then I always go to another synagogue.

And my father returned the lie when he died:

“I’ve gone to another life.”

Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57322/for-the-fallen

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse   to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox   when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,   I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?   And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility,   and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,   and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,   and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.   When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.   When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.   I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.   I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
Mary Oliver When Death Comes