Happy Birthday Anais. I love you.
Art by Anna Baibokova
Category Archives: Poetry
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” ~Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
Art by Séverine Pineaux
“I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.” ~Mary Oliver
Art by Natasa Ilincic
Source~ Shamantube
DANGEROUS COATS by Sharon Owens
“Someone clever once said Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets To spread sedition
Which means unrest To you & me
A grandiose word For
commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies,
Start sewing Dangerous coats Made of pockets & sedition.”
“She had blue skin, And so did he. He kept it hid, And so did she. They searched for blue Their whole life through, Then passed right by- And never knew.” ~Shel Silverstein
“my god is not waiting inside a church or sitting above the temple’s steps. my god is the refugee’s breath as she’s running, is living in the starving child’s belly, is the heartbeat of the protest. my god does not rest between pages written by holy men. my god lives between the sweaty thighs of women’s bodies sold for money, was last seen washing the homeless man’s feet. my god is not as unreachable as they’d like you to think. my god is beating inside us infinitely” ~Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” ~Mary Oliver
Art by Dan May
