For Rachel Hadas

Old wounds leave good hollows

Where one who goes can hold

Himself in ghostly embraces

Of former powers and graces

Whose domain no strife mars—

I am made whole by my scars

For whatever now displaces

Follows all that once was

And without loss stows

Me into my own spaces



Samuel Menashe





From The Niche Narrows: New
and Selected Poems, Talisman
House, Publishers

By John Roedel

 whenever I feel helpless

in this overwhelming world

I become a helper

oh, oh,

my love

on the days

when it feels like

I have no power

I serve others

you see,

whenever I wash

the world’s feet

my hands

immediately

stop shaking

~ and I know peace

~ and I reclaim my power

~ and I get back to work

 

After
By Stephen Dunn


Jack and Jill at home together after their fall,

the bucket spilled, her knees badly scraped,

and Jack with not even an aspirin for what’s broken.

We can see the arduous evenings ahead of them.

And the need now to pay a boy to fetch the water.

Our mistake was trying to do something together,

Jill sighs. Jack says, If you’d have let go for once

you wouldn’t have come tumbling after.

He’s in a wheelchair, but she’s still an item--

for the rest of their existence confined

to a little, rhyming story. We tell it to our children,

who laugh, already accustomed to disaster.

We’d like to teach them the secrets

of knowing how to go too far,

but Jack is banging with his soup spoon,

Jill is pulling out her hair. Out of decency

we turn away, as if it were possible to escape

the drift of our lives, the fundamental business

of making do with what’s been left us.

 Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

A Man in His Life: A Poem by Yehuda Amichai

 

אדם בחייו אין לו זמן שיהיה לו

זמן לכל.

ואין לו עת שתהיה לו עת

לכל חפץ. קהלת לא צדק כשאמר כך.

A man in his life doesn’t have time to have
a time for everything.
He doesn't have enough seasons to have a season
for every purpose. Qohelet didn’t get it right when he said that.

אדם צריך לשנא ולאהב בבת אחת

באותן עיניים לבכות ובאותן עיניים לצחוק

באותן ידים לזרוק אבנים

ובאותן ידים לאסוף אותן,

לעשות אהבה במלחמה ומלחמה באהבה.

A man needs to love and hate in the same instant,
to laugh and cry with one and the same eyes,
with one and the same hands to throw stones,
and with one and the same hands to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.

ולשנוא ולסלוח ולזכור ולשכוח

ולסדר ולבלבל ולאכל ולעכל

את מה שהסטוריה ארכה

עושה בשנים רבות מאד.

To hate and forgive, to remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and digest
what history elongates
over a great many years.

אדם בחייו אין לו זמן.

כשהוא מאבד הוא מחפש

כשהוא מוצא הוא שוכח,

כשהוא שוכח הוא אוהב

וכשהוא אוהב הוא מתחיל לשכוח.

A man in his life doesn’t have time.
The moment he lets go, he seeks.
The moment he finds, he forgets.
The moment he forgets, he loves.
The moment he loves, he begins to forget. 

ונפשו למודה,

His soul is skilled,

ונפשו מקצועית מאד

רק גופו נשאר חובב

תמיד. מנסה וטועה

לא לומד ומתבלבל

שכור ועור בתענוגיו ובמכאוביו.

his soul is very efficient.
Only his body remains an amateur
forever. It tries and errs,
it doesn’t learn, it gets confused,
drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains.

מות תאנים ימות בסתו

מצמק ומלא בעצמו ומתוק,

העלים מתיבשים על האדמה,

והענפים הערומים כבר מצביעים

אל המקום שבו זמן לכל.

He will die as figs do, in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
leaves dessicating on the ground,
bare branches already pointing
to the place where there's time for everything.

Happiness

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.

One new perception,
one fresh thought,
one act of surrender,
one change of heart,
one leap of faith,
can change your life forever.

 
- Robert Holden