choices

There is a great deal of wisdom packed in this perplexing little poem by Nikki Giovanni.

Choices

if i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do

it's not the same thing
but it's the best i can
do

if i can't have
what i want    then
my job is to want
what i've got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more
to want

since i can't go
where i need
to go    then i must    go
where the signs point
though always understanding
parallel movement
isn't lateral

when i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal
i know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry

—Nikki Giovanni

shifting source of sorrow

Has this happened to you?   You find yourself emotionally distraught over something that had never mattered before.This poem describes it so well.
 

Second Tour

Penelope Scambly Schott

While my husband packed to fly back to Vietnam,

this time as a tourist instead of a soldier,

I drove to the zoo to say goodbye to the musk oxen

who were being shipped out early next morning

to Tacoma. We were getting lions instead.

When I got there, it was too easy to park.

The zoo was closing early so they wouldn’t let me in.

I went back to my car and slid into the driver’s seat.

Sobs tore from deep in my chest, I who had never

seen a musk ox and never cared until now.

 Crow Mercies, Calyx Books, 2010.

To be lost is only a failure of memory

What a gorgeous poem this is. Just what I needed today. I hope it moves you too.

A Boat

Margaret Atwood

Evening comes on and the hills thicken;
red and yellow bleaching out of the leaves.
The chill pines grow their shadows.

Below them the water stills itself,
a sunset shivering in it.
One more going down to join the others.

Now the lake expands
and closes in, both.

The blackness that keeps itself
under the surface in daytime
emerges from it like mist
or as mist.

Distance vanishes, the absence
of distance pushes against the eyes.

There is no seeing the lake,
only the outlines of the hills
which are almost identical,

familiar to me as sleep,
shores unfolding upon shores
in their contours of slowed breathing.

It is touch I go by,
the boat like a hand feeling
through shoals and among
dead trees, over the boulders
lifting unseen, layer
on layer of drowned time falling away.

This is how I learned to steer
through darkness by no stars.

To be lost is only a failure of memory.

"A Boat" by Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976-1986.

Nothing Stays

A poem about impermanence,  our wish to keep things the way they are, our desire to control.

The Promise

Jane Hirshfield,   

Stay, I said

to the cut flowers.

They bowed

their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,

who fled.

Stay, leaf.

It reddened,

embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,

obedient for a moment,

soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth

of riverine valley meadows,

of fossiled escarpments,

of limestone and sandstone.

It looked back

with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.

Each answered,

Always.

Come, Thief, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

This is perfect if you have a teenager in your life.

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl 

by Billy Collins

Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon
on the day you were born,
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that all alone.
So never mind;
you’re fine just being yourself.
You’re loved for just being you.

But did you know that at your age
Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room –
no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?

Of course, there will be time for all that
later in your life, after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom,
or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason I keep remembering
that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England
when she was only 15.
But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.

A few centuries later,
when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas
and two complete masses as a youngster.

But of course, that was in Austria
at the height of Romantic lyricism,
not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you’re special just being you –
playing with your food and staring into space.

By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.