Faith

By David Whyte

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,

slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

Very early this AM I had some beautiful haiku centered moments with a dear old friend. Here are some haiku he shared:

Breathing by a lake
Creation flows in and out
Blessings from above

The lake in my mind
Ripples flowing gently out
At One with above

Purring and so wise
On my papers so handsome
My four legged child

Had it and lost it
Pre coffee or just old me
With my friend Reb Neil

Monte (Peace In Our Time)

By David Kirby

Once I got a postcard from Joyce Carol Oates,
whose novel Unholy Loves I had reviewed favorably,
and on it (the card) she wrote,
"I think you must be a fellow Canadian,"
and I figured, well! That's me, all right:
the Mounties, Wayne Gretzky, Margaret Atwood. . . .
It wasn't until years later
when I found the card again
while cleaning up some old files
that I saw she had written
not "Canadian" but "Conradian"
(in fact, I had mentioned a Conrad essay
she'd published elsewhere),
and I thought of the poster I'd seen for a Monet show,
only the artist's name was spelled "Monte."
I could see this Monte in his plaid jacket
and his open collar and his medallion
nestled in his chest hairs just so,
calling for a corned beef sandwich,
"very lean, please," and a Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Tonic
so he'd have the energy to finish, say,
Caesar's Palace: The Façade at Sunset.
Names mean too much;
for example, if you called a general "Genital,"
as in, "Your car's ready, Genital--urrk!"
he'd kill you in a fit of rage,
and his bodyguards, confused by the gunfire
and the screaming, would fill the air with bullets
and take him right out of the picture.
Bingo, no more war.

The Rainbow

By William Wordsworth (1770–185)

My heart leaps up when I behold 
 A rainbow in the sky:
 So was it when my life began;
 So is it now I am a man;
 So be it when I shall grow old, 5
Or let me die!
 The Child is father of the Man;
 I could wish my days to be
 Bound each to each by natural piety.

Nothing Gold Can Stay - Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

By Yehoshua November

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.

For algae spores
and fungus spores,
bonded by vital
mutual genetic cooperation,
spreading their
inseparable lives
from equator to pole.

My hand, my arm,
make sweeping circles.
Dust climbs the ladder of light.
For this infernal, endless chore,
for these eternal seeds of rain:
Thank you. For dust.

Marilyn Nelson