Awakening Now

by Danna Faulds

Why wait for your awakening?

The moment your eyes are open, seize the day.

Would you hold back when the Beloved beckons?

Would you deliver your litany of sins like a child’s collection of sea shells, prized and labeled?

“No, I can’t step across the threshold,” you say, eyes downcast.

“I’m not worthy” I’m afraid, and my motives aren’t pure.

I’m not perfect, and surely I haven’t practiced nearly enough.

My meditation isn’t deep, and my prayers are sometimes insincere.

I still chew my fingernails, and the refrigerator isn’t clean.

“Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door?

Forgive yourself.

Now is the only time you have to be whole.

Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true Self.
Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.

Please, oh please, don’t continue to believe in your disbelief.

This is the day of your awakening.

From: Go In and In:
Poems From the Heart of Yoga

Downpour By Billy Collins

Last night we ended up on the couch
trying to remember
all of the friends who had died so far,

and this morning I wrote them down
in alphabetical order
on the flip side of a shopping list
you had left on the kitchen table.

So many of them had been swept away
as if by a hand from the sky,
it was good to recall them,
I was thinking
under the cold lights of a supermarket
as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel
up and down the long strident aisles.

I was on the lookout for blueberries,
English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,
light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,
and whatever else was on the list,
which I managed to keep grocery side up,

until I had passed through the electric doors,
where I stopped to realize,
as I turned the list over,
that I had forgotten Terry O’Shea
as well as the bananas and the bread.

It was pouring by then,
spilling, as they say in Ireland,
people splashing across the lot to their cars.
And that is when I set out,
walking slowly and precisely,
a soaking-wet man
bearing bags of groceries,
walking as if in a procession honoring the dead.

I felt I owed this to Terry,
who was such a strong painter,
for almost forgetting him
and to all the others who had formed
a circle around him on the screen in my head.

I was walking more slowly now
in the presence of the compassion
the dead were extending to a comrade,

plus I was in no hurry to return
to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you
all about Terry and the bananas and the bread.

Love and Dread By Rachel Hadas

A desiccated daffodil.
A pigeon cooing on the sill.
The old cat lives on love and water.
Your mother’s balanced by your daughter:
one faces death, one will give birth.
The fulcrum is our life on earth,
beginning, ending in a bed.
We have to marry love and dread.
Dark clouds are roiling in the sky.
The daily drumbeat of the lie,
steady—no, crescendoing.
This premature deceptive spring,
forsythia’s in bloom already.
The challenge: balance. Keep it steady,
now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,
now Googling a rare sarcoma.
The ghost cat’s weightless on my lap.
My mother’s ghost floats through my nap,
as, dearest heart, we lie in bed.
Oh, we must marry love and dread:
must shield our senses from the glare
and clamor of chaos everywhere.
Life bestows gifts past expectation.
It’s time to plan a celebration:
dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
certain that summer follows spring,
that new life blossoms from the past.
The baby is the youngest guest.
But just how long can we depend
on a recurrence without end?
Everything changes, even change.
The tapestry of seasons strange-
ly stirs in an uneasy wind
that teases dreamlike through the mind.
I reach for you across the bed.
Oh, how to marry love and dread?

.My Coronet

l

If I in my daily contact

....... Of school days spent with you

Have taught you

.......To live content with small means,

To seek elegance rather than luxury,

.......Refinement rather than fashion,

To be most worthy and respectable,

.......To study hard, talk gently and act

......................frankly,

To listen with open mind and heart

.......And grow up to be all that you should:

Cheerful, brave, and true

.......To G-d, home, and country;

Then I shall have completed

.......The setting of another tiny jewel, with

..................care

Into the crown of my life work.

O

FRANCES G.V. KENNY

The Song of He'ezinu

Translated by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan ZT"L

Listen heaven! I will speak! Earth! Hear the words of my mouth! My lesson shall drop like rain, my saying shall flow down like the dew - like a downpour on the herb, like a shower on the grass.

When I proclaim God's name, praise God for His greatness. The deeds of the Mighty One are perfect, for all His ways are just. He is a faithful God, never unfair; righteous and moral is He. Destruction is His children's fault, not His own, you warped and twisted generation. Is this the way you repay God, you ungrateful, unwise nation? Is He not your Father, your Master, the One who made and established you?

Remember days long gone by. Ponder the years of each generation. Ask your father and let him tell you, and your grandfather, who will explain it. When the Most High gave nations their heritage and split up the sons of man, He set up the borders of nations to parallel the number of Israel's descendants. But His own nation remained God's portion; Jacob was the lot of His heritage.

He brought them into being in a desert region, in a desolate, howling wasteland. He encompassed them and granted them wisdom, protecting them like the pupil of His eye. Like an eagle arousing its nest, hovering over its young, He spread His wings and took them, carrying them on His pinions. God alone guided them; there was no alien power with Him.

He carried them over the earth's highest places, to feast on the crops of the field. He let them suckle honey from the bedrock, oil from the flinty cliff. They had the cheese of cattle, milk of sheep, fat of lambs, rams of the Bashan, and luscious fat wheat. They drank the blood of grapes for wine. Jeshurun thus became fat and rebelled. You grew fat, thick and gross. The nation abandoned the God who made it and spurned the Mighty One who was its support.

They provoked His jealousy with alien practices; made Him angry with vile deeds. They sacrificed to demons who were non-gods, deities they never knew. These were new things, recently arrived, which their fathers would never consider. You thus ignored the Mighty One who bore you; forgot the Power who delivered you.

When God saw this, He was offended, provoked by His sons and daughters. He said: I will hide My face from them, and see what will be their end. They are a generation which reverses itself and cannot be trusted. They have been faithless to Me with a non-god, angering Me with their meaningless acts. Now I will be unfaithful to them with a non-nation, provoking them with a nation devoid of gratitude. My anger has kindled a fire, burning to the lowest depths. It shall consume the land and its crops, setting fire to the foundations of mountains. I will heap evil upon them, striking them with My arrows.

They will be bloated by famine, consumed by fever, cut down by bitter plague. I will send against them fanged beasts, with venomous creatures who crawl in the dust. Outside, the sword shall butcher boys, girls, infants, white-headed elders, while inside, there shall be terror. I was prepared to exterminate them, to make their memory vanish from among mankind. But I was concerned that their enemies would be provoked, and their attackers alienated, so that they would say, 'Our superior power and not God, was what caused all this.' But they are a nation who destroys good advice, and they themselves have no understanding. If they were wise, they would contemplate this, and understand what their end will be.

How could one [man] pursue a thousand, or two [men], ten thousand, if their Mighty One had not given them over, and God had not trapped them? Their powers are not like our Mighty One, although our enemies sit in judgment. But their vine is from the vine of Sodom and the shoot of Gomorrah. Their grapes are poison grapes; their grape cluster is bitterness to them. Their vine is serpents' venom, like the poison of the dreadful cobra.

But it is concealed with Me for the future, sealed up in My treasury. I have vengeance and retribution, waiting for their foot to slip. Their day of disaster is near, and their time is about to come. God will then take up the cause of His people, and comfort His servants. He will have seen that their power is gone, with nothing left to keep or abandon.

[God] will then say: Where is their god, the power in which they trusted? [Where are the gods] who ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their libations? Let them now get up and help you! Let them be your protector! But now see! It is I! I am the [only] One! There are no [other] gods with Me! I kill and give life! If I crushed, I will heal! But there is no protection from My power!

I lift My hand to heaven and say: I am Life forever. I will whet My lightning sword and grasp judgment in My hand. I will bring vengeance against My foes, and repay those who hated Me.

I will make My arrows drunk with blood, My sword consuming flesh. The enemy's first punishment will be the blood of the slain and wounded. Let the tribes of His nation sing praise, for He will avenge His servants' blood. He will bring vengeance upon His foes, and reconcile His people [to] His land.

Yom Kippur

By Phillip Schultz

You are asked to stand and bow your head,
consider the harm you've caused,
the respect you've withheld,
the anger misspent, the fear spread,
the earnestness displayed
in the service of prestige and sensibility,
all the callous, cruel, stubborn, joyless sins
in your alphabet of woe
so that you might be forgiven.
You are asked to believe in the spark
of your divinity, in the purity
of the words of your mouth
and the memories of your heart.
You are asked for this one day and one night
to starve your body so your soul can feast
on faith and adoration.
You are asked to forgive the past
and remember the dead, to gaze
across the desert in your heart
toward Jerusalem. To separate
the sacred from the profane
and be as numerous as the sands
and the stars of heaven.
To believe that no matter what
you have done to yourself and others
morning will come and the mountain
of night will fade. To believe,
for these few precious moments,
in the utter sweetness of your life.
You are asked to bow your head
and remain standing,
and say Amen.

Small Kindnesses

By Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”