Poetry Page

By cutting to the truth of our experience, poetry shakes us and awakens us. Through it we open our eyes to what Robert Frost called “the pleasure of taking pains.” And what is gratitude besides this playful engagement with life as it unfolds in all its challenges and delights?

Faith
by David Whyte
In times of rampant disillusionment, it's hard to know where to find faith, a wholehearted enthusiasm for life. Whyte's poem introduces a slender wedge of illumination, opening the way for faith to grow. (PCC)

Any Morning
by William Stafford
Since when did you give yourself permission to rest in a moment of simple pleasure, free from judgment? Take to heart Stafford's hint: Pick up and save these "pieces of Heaven" which can happen any morning. (PCC)

Planting Chant
Osage oral tradition
This Osage chant, handed down from mothers to daughters, firmly repeats a single, powerful phrase -- "I made a footprint." Not only do these footprints become the seedbeds from which corn grows; they also keep us quite literally in touch with Earth's generosity. From this connection a joyous well-being arises, as surely as new green sprouts appear in Spring. (PCC)

The Rainbow
by William Wordsworth
The leaping up of the heart is an image for gratitude which everyone in the world will understand. It is something which we can experience whenever we see a rainbow. Childhood, adulthood, and elder years are all threaded together by the remembrance of moments in which our heart leaps. “Piety,” the last word of the poem, literally means “family affection.” Gratefulness connects us with all of nature, and this threading together is the literal meaning of the Latin “religio,” from which we get the word “religion.” (Br. David)

Cut Brambles Long Enough
by Sun Bu-er, translated by Jane Hirshfield
Popularly known as "one of the seven immortals," Sun Bu-er (1124 AD - ?) became the greatest woman teacher of Taoism in China. Both she and her husband earned reputations as completely realized beings, although she first raised three children and undertook full-time spiritual practice only at the age of fifty-one. As Jane Hirshfield has noted, the poem that appears here "speaks of the relationship between effort and the realization everywhere present." (Mary Ford-Grabowsky)

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Poetry Editors: Patricia C. Carlson (PCC), Dale Biron (DB), Brother David Steindl-Rast (Br. David)