Poetry

Jan 3, 2023 ∞

Let Yourself Rest

My acupuncturist shared this poem, by Jeff Foster, with me yesterday. On hearing it, I felt as though I was being wrapped in a warm blanket.

LET YOURSELF REST

If you’re exhausted, rest.
If you don’t feel like starting a new project, don’t.
If you don’t feel the urge to make something new,
just rest in the beauty of the old, the familiar, the known.
If you don’t feel like talking, stay silent.
If you’re fed up with the news, turn it off.
If you want to postpone something until tomorrow, do it.
If you want to do nothing, let yourself do nothing today.
Feel the fullness of the emptiness, the vastness of the silence. the sheer life in your unproductive moments.
Time does not always need to be filled.
You are enough, simply in your being.

Dec 19, 2022 ∞

Sunday afternoon
Dozing -
As the rain falls relentlessly outside.

Jul 2, 2022 ∞

Summer showers,
Heavy but brief -
Steam rising from the asphalt.

Jul 27, 2019 ∞

A Poem That I Always Come Back To

Since I first came across this poem, it comes to me in times of doubt. It reminds me of those who do feel different, who question the normal route through life that the modern world and education ask of us. It calls to me of the seekers, the questioners, of those who see things differently, look deeply, of those, men and women, who are, "…too gentle to live among wolves," the sensitive souls.

Their questions, in my opinion, are real. Indeed the gifts that they are born into this world with, might given them no choice but to be different.

There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves

by James Kavanaugh

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love.

James Kavanaugh later wrote about his poem,

If anything has changed over the years, and it has, I only feel more confident now about what I wrote then. I am far more aware of the power that guides each of us along the way, and provides us with the insights and people we need for our journey. There are, indeed, men and women too gentle to live among wolves and only when joined with them will life offer the searcher, step by step, all that is good and beautiful. Life becomes not a confused struggle or pointless pain, but an evolving mosaic masterpiece of the person we were destined to become.