FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

A Sabbath Poem (St. John of the Cross - 2)

IF YOU LOVE
~ by St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)
You might quiet the whole world for a second

if you pray.
And if you love, if you

really love,
our guns will

wilt.



(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002)

A Sabbath Poem (Rabia)

I HOPE GOD THINKS LIKE THAT
~ Rabia of Basra (c. 717-801)

There is a dog I sometimes take for a walk
and turn loose in a
field,

when I can’t give her that freedom
I feel in debt.

I hope God thinks like that and

is keeping track of all
the bliss He
owes
me.

Born nearly five hundred years before Rumi, Rabia was a central female Islamic figure of Sufi tradition. As a young woman, while wandering homeless, she was abducted, sold into slavery and spend decades working in a brothel, exposed to both physical and sexual abuse. Later in life, she became one of the greatest women saints and poets known to history. She once said, "What a place for trials and transformation did my lover put me, but never once did He look upon me as if I were impure." Rabia is a timely spiritual voice for women of this century, especially for any woman (or man) who had had to suffer the emotionally crippling degradation of unwanted touch. After she was given freedom, she helped people heal and was offered a bag of gold for her work, to which she responded, "Dear, if you leave that, flies with gather as if a horse just relieved himself, and I might slip in it while dancing."

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002)

A Sabbath Poem (St. Teresa)

THE SKY’S SHEETS
~ St. Teresa of Avila

When God touches me I clutch the sky’s
sheets,
the way other
lovers
do
the earth’s weave
of clay.
Any real ecstasy is a sign
you are moving
in the right
direction,
don’t let any prude tell
you otherwise.


(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002)

A Sabbath Poem (Amichai)

THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT
~ by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

(You Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right,
by Brad Hirschfield, Harmony Books, 2007)

A Sabbath Poem (Piercy)

TO BE OF USE
~ by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

(from Good Poems, selected by Garrison Keillor)

A Sabbath Poem (Ibn 'Arabi)

FIRE
~ by Muhammad
Ibn 'Arabi (Sufi Poet)

O Marvel! A garden amidst the flames of Love.
My heart has become capable of every form:
it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
a temple for the Hindu God's and the pilgrim's Ka'bah,
the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Qur'an.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camel takes me,
that is my religion and my faith.
(Thank you Rabia Gentile for sending us this poem!)

A Sabbath Poem (Rumi - 4))

PRAYER IS AN EGG
~ by Jalaludin Rumi (1207-1273)

Don't do daily prayers like a bird
pecking, moving its head
up and down. Prayer is an egg.

Hatch out the total helplessness inside.

(translated by Coleman Barks)

A Sabbath Poem (Markova)

I WILL NOT DIE AN UNLIVED LIFE
~ by Dawna Markova

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

(from I Will Not Die an Unlived Life,
by Dawna Markova, Conari Press, 2000)

A Sabbath Poem (Machado)

WAKE UP
~ by Antonio Machado

I love Jesus who told us
heaven and earth will pass.
When heaven and earth have passed,
my word will still remain.
O Jesus, what was your word?
Love? Forgiveness? Charity?
All your words were
one word: Awake!

(quoted in The Music of Time by John S. Dunne,
source: www.spiritualityandpractice.org)

A Sabbath Poem (Budbill)

DILEMMA
~ by David Budbill

I want to be
            famous
so I can be
            humble
about being
            famous.

What good is my
            humility
when I am
            stuck 
in this
            obscurity?

(from Good Poems, Selected and Introduced
by Garrison Keillor, Penguin 2002)

A Sabbath Poem (Stafford)

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER
~ by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(A Scripture of Leaves, Brethren Press, 2nd edition, 1999)

A Sabbath Poem (Tagliabue)

MODERATION IS NOT A NEGATION OF
INTENSITY, BUT HELPS AVOID MONOTONY
~by John Tagliabue

Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself
    together
for some clear "meaning"--some momentary summary?
    no one
can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day;
    the ordinary
blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the
    health sometimes,
only Dostoevsky can be Dostoevskian at such long
    long tumultuous stretches;
look what that intensity did to poor great Van Gogh;
    linger, lounge,
scrounge and be stupid, that doesn't take much centering
    of one's forces;
as wise Whitman said "lounge and invite the soul." Get
    enough sleep;
and not only because (as Cocteau said) "poetry is the
    literature of sleep";
be a dumb bell for few minutes at least; we don't want
    Sunday church bells
    ringing constantly.

(Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, Penguin Books, 2003)

A Sabbath Poem (Howe)

PART OF EVE'S DISCUSSION
~ by Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was like that, only
all the time.

(from The Good Thief, by Maria Howe, Persea Books, 1988)

A Sabbath Poem (Berry - 3)

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
~ by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, Penguin Books, 2003)

A Sabbath Poem (Sutphen)

LIVING IN THE BODY
~ by Joyce Sutphen

Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly--better to leave it as it is.

Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.

(Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, Penguin Books, 2003)

A Sabbath Poem (Shelley)

LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY      
~ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

The fountains mingle with the river   
And the rivers with the ocean,   
The winds of heaven mix for ever   
With a sweet emotion;   
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine   
In one another's being mingle—   
Why not I with thine?   

See the mountains kiss high heaven,   
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven   
If it disdain'd its brother;   
And the sunlight clasps the earth,   
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—   
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley (1969)

A Sabbath Poem (Bialosky)

ANOTHER LOSS TO STOP FOR
~ by Jill Bialosky

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,
to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

(from Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives,
by Wayne Muller, Bantam Books, 1999, on this website)

A Sabbath Poem (Gibran)

TRUST THE PHYSICIAN
~ by Kahlil Gibran

Trust the physician, and drink his remedy
   in silence and tranquility:
   For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided
   by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips,
   has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter
   has moistened with his own sacred tears.

(source: Bruderhof, Daily Dig)

A Sabbath Poem (Rumi - 3)

PROBLEM WITH HUMAN "GOD TALK"
~ by Jalaludin Rumi (1207-1273)

 
Those who don't feel this Love
                pulling them like a river,
                those who don't drink dawn
                like a cup of spring water
                or take in sunset like supper,
                those who don't want to change,  

let them sleep.  

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
                that old trickery and hypocrisy.
                If you want to improve your mind that way,  

sleep on.                  

I've given up on my brain.
                I've torn the cloth to shreds
                and thrown it away.  

             

If you're not completely naked,
                wrap your beautiful robe of words
                around you,  

and sleep.

(Like This: Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks, Maypop Books 1990)

A Sabbath Poem (Rilke - 3)

LET EVERYTHING HAPPEN
~ by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

(from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Three Sabbath Poems (Aquinas)

~by St. Thomas Aquinas, (1225-1274)


CLOSE TO GOD

One may never have heard the sacred word “Christ,”
but be closer to God
than a priest or
nun.

LET ME EMBRACE YOU

I said to God, “Let me love you.”
And He replied, “Which part?”
“All of you, all of you,” I said.
“Dear,” God spoke, “you are as a mouse
wanting to impregnate a tiger.”

ON THE SABBATH

On the Sabbath try and make no noise that
goes beyond your
house.
Cries of passion between lovers
are exempt.


(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

A Sabbath Poem (African)

MY PRAYER, OUR PRAYER
~ African

One person
is not a good thing.

One person
is certainly not
a good thing.

O Lord,
please do not make me
one person.

(from Learning to Pray: How We Find Heaven on Earth,
by Wayne Muller, Bantam Book 2003)

A Sabbath Poem (Nye)

KINDNESS
~ by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
Like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved,
All this must go so you know
How desolate the landscape can be
Between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
Thinking the bus will never stop,
The passengers eating maize and chicken
Will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
Lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
How he too was someone
Who journeyed through the night with plans
And the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
Catches the thread of all sorrows
And you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
Only kindness that ties your shoes
And sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
And then goes with you everywhere
Like a shadow or a friend.

(from The Words Under the Words:
Selected Poems, Eight Mountain Press, 1995)

A Sabbath Poem (Lewis)

      THE APOLOGIST'S EVENING PRAYER
     ~ by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

      From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
      From all the victories that I seemed to score;
      From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
      At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
      From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
      Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

      Thoughts are but coins.  Let me not trust, instead
      of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
      From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
      O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
      Lord of the narrow gate and needle's eye,
      Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

      (source:  sorry, can't remember)

A Sabbath Poem (Zeitlin)

SING OUT
~ by Aaron Zeitlin

Praise me, says God;
I will know that you love me.
Curse me, says God;
I will know that you love me.
Sing out my graces, says God.
Raise your fist against me and revile.
Sing out my praises or revile.
Reviling is also a kind of praise, says God.
But if you sit fenced off
in your apathy, says God.
If you sit entrenched in:
"I don't give a hang."
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.

(translation: Emanuel Goldsmith)

A Sabbath Poem (Berry-2)

EVEN WHILE I DREAMED I PRAYED
~ by Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear
    and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective
    the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked
    like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now
    pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in
    pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction
    of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction
    of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way
to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who
    ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the
    ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

(from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997,
by Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 1998)

A Sabbath Poem (Vuletic)

        
            TENACITY
            ~ by Simona Vuletic

            When dreams turn into
            Nightmares
            The only way
            To survive
            Is to keep dreaming,
            Boldly,
            Turning darkness
                        into light,
            Despair
                        into hope,
            Locked doors
                        into sign-posts,
            With perseverance
            Of those who have nothing
            To lose,
            One simple, steady day
            At the time.

Simona Vuletic is from Seattle, USA, where she is engaged in Alzheimer's disease research, and interested in social issues, issues of justice, politics, environment, the brain, the Universe, science, human behavior, religion and beliefs, and human rights.  She blogs at Zvrk's Blog.

A Sabbath Poem (Hafiz-3)

WITH THAT MOON LANGUAGE
~by Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c. 1320-1389)


Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,

with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?



(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

A Sabbath Poem (Milosz)

            

             untitled
             ~ by Czeslaw Milosz

            "In this world
            we walk on the roof of hell
            gazing at flowers."

            To know and not to speak.
            In that way one forgets.
            What is pronounced
            strengthens itself
            What is not  pronounced
            tends to nonexistence.

(received from Danut Manastireanu, Romania)

A Sabbath Poem (Bly)

        THE NIGHT ABRAHAM CALLED TO THE STARS
        ~ by Richard Bly

        Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
        The stars?  He cried to Saturn:  "You are my Lord!"
        How happy he was!  When he saw the Dawn Star,

        He cried, ""You are my Lord!"  How destroyed he was
        When he watched them set.  Friends, he is like us:
        We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

        We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
        We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
        The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

        And no one can convince us that mud is not
        Beautiful.  It is our badger soul that thinks so.
        We are ready to spend the rest of our life

        Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
        We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
        We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

        My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
        Abandoned woman by night.  Friend, tell me what to do,
        Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

(first appeared in Poetry Magazine) 

This poem based loosely on the Islamic ghazal form in which a major portion of Sufi poetry was written.  Almost all work of Hafiz was in ghazal form. In its classic form, each stanza stands alone–has its own landscape, so to speak–and the theme of the poem is never stated.  The reader has much more to do than he would be used to in the contemporary English poem.

A Sabbath Poem (Apllinaire)

      COME TO THE EDGE
      ~ by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), French Poet and Philosopher

      “Come to the edge.”
      “We can’t.  We’re afraid.”
      “Come to the edge.”
      And they came.
      And he pushed them.
      And they flew. 

A Sabbath Poem (St. John of the Cross)

WHAT IS GRACE?
~ by St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)


"What is grace?" I asked God.

And He said,

"All that happens."

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

"Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved's arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me

until the heart has
wisdom."

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

A Sabbath Poem (Rumi - 2)

        DERVISH AT THE DOOR
        ~ by Jalaludin Rumi (1207-1273)

        A dervish* knocked at a house
        to ask for a piece of dry bread,
        or moist, it didn't matter.
        "This is not a bakery," said the owner.
        "Might you have a piece of gristle then?"
        "Does this look like butchershop?"
        "A little flour?"
        "Do you hear a grinding stone?"
        "Some water?"
        "This is not a well."
        Whatever the dervish asked for,
        the man made some tired joke
        and refused to give him anything.
        Finally the dervish ran into the house,
        lifted his robe, and squatted
        as though to relieve himself.

        "Hey, hey!"
        "Quiet, you sad man. A deserted place
        is a fine spot to relieve oneself,
        and since there's no living thing here,
        or means of living, it needs fertilizing."
        The dervish began his own list
        of questions and answers.
        "What kind of bird are you? Not a falcon,
        trained for a royal hand. Not a peacock,
        painted with everyone's eyes. Not a parrot,
        that talks for sugar cubes. Not a nightingale,
        that sings like someone in love.
        Not a hoopoe bringing messages to Solomon,
        or a stork that builds on a cliffside.
        What exactly do you do?
        You are no known species.
        You haggle and make jokes
        to keep what you own for yourself.
        You have forgotten the One
        who doesn't care about ownership,
        who doesn't try to turn a profit
        from every human exchange."

        *Dervishes were Sufi poets, whirling dancers, mystics of Islam 

(from Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, HarperOne, 1997)

A Sabbath Poem (Holmes)

             

           PEACE BE UNTO THEE, STRANGER
           ~by Ernest Holmes (1887-1960)

           Peace be unto thee, stranger, enter and be not afraid.
           I have left the gate open and thou art welcome to my home.
           There is room in my house for all.
           I have swept the hearth and lighted the fire.
           The room is warm and cheerful and you will find comfort and rest within.
           The table is laid and the fruits of Life are spread before thee.
           The wine is here also, it sparkles in the light.
           I have set a chair for you where the sunbeams dance through the shade.
           Sit and rest and refresh your soul.
           Eat of the fruit and drink the wine.
           All, all is yours, and you are welcome.

(source:  I found this poem on the table of the
Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity in New York)

A Sabbath Poem (Eckhart)

AN IMAGE THAT MAKES THEM SAD
~ by Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

How long will grown men and women in this world
keep drawing in their coloring books
an image of God that
makes them
sad?

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

A Sabbath Poem (St. Catherine)

HIS LIPS UPON THE VEIL
~by St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

He has never left you.

It is just
that your soul is so vast
that just like

the earth in its innocence,
it may think,

"I do not feel my lover's warmth
against my face right
now."

But look, dear,
is not the sun reaching down its arms
and always holding a continent
in its light?

God cannot leave us.
It is just that our soul is so vast,

we do not always feel His lips
upon the
veil.

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

A Sabbath Poem (Rumi)

 

                    TIME TO THINK
                    ~ by Jalaludin Rumi (1207-1273)

                    Sit down and be quiet.
                    You are drunk, and this is the
                    edge of the roof.

(from Turning to One Another, by Margaret J. Wheatley,
2002, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.)

A Sabbath Poem (Okri)

          from MENTAL FIGHT
          ~ by Ben Okri, Nigeria

          What will we choose?
          Will we allow ourselves to descend
          Into universal chaos and darkness?
          A world without hope, without wholeness
          Without moorings, without light,
          Without possibility for mental fight,
          A world breeding mass murderers
          Energy vampires, serial killers
          With minds pining in anomie and amorality
          With murder, rape, genocide as normality?

          Or will we allow ourselves merely to drift
          Into an era of more of the same
          An era drained of significance, without shame,
          Without wonder or excitement,
          Just the same low-grade entertainment,
          An era boring and predictable
          ‘Flat, stale, weary and unprofitable’
          In which we drift
          In which we drift along
          Too bored and too passive to care
          About what strange realities rear
          Their heads in our days and nights,
          Till we awake too late to the death of our rights
          Too late to do anything
          Too late for thinking
          About what we have allowed
          To take over our lives
          While we cruised along in casual flight
          Mildly indifferent to storm or sunlight?

          Or might we choose to make
          This time a waking-up event
          A moment of world empowerment?
          To pledge, in private, to be more aware
          More playful, more tolerant, and more fair
          More responsible, more wild, more loving
          Awake to our unsuspected powers, more amazing.

          We rise or fall by the choices we make
          It all depends on the road we take
          And the choice and the road each depend
          On the light that we have, the light we bend,
          On the light we use
          Or refuse
          On the lies we live by
          And from which we die.

(from Mental Fight, by Ben Okri, 1999, David Godwin Associates))

A Sabbath Poem (Kelley)

          CHOOSE LIFE
          ~ by Sister Helen Kelley

          Choose Life
          only that and always,
          and at whatever risk.
          To let life leak out, to let it wear away by
          the mere passage of time, to withold
          giving it and spreading it
          is to choose
          nothing.

(from Turning to One Another, by Margaret J. Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002)

A Sabbath Poem (Moreau)

          RECAST THE EARTH
          ~ by Robert F. Moreau

          Do you have any wild hopes,
          Or tame ones for that matter?

          The possibility of acorns becoming towering oaks,
          Or caterpillars blossoming into butterflies,
          Or that dawn will cast away midnight fears?

          Wild hopes!

          That all creation will learn the dance of joy,
          And all humanity might taste the wine of peace,
          And that our loving God will become transparent
          Through our love.

          “Recast the earth, O Lord,
          And move our hearts with wild hopes!”

(thank you Jess for sending us this poem)

A Sabbath Poem (Rilke - 2)

          IF A SADNESS RISES IN FRONT OF YOU
          ~ by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

          You mustn't be frightened
          if a sadness
          rises in front of you,
          larger than any you have ever seen;
          if an anxiety,
          like light and cloud-shadows,
          moves over your hands and over
          everything you do.
          You must realize that something is
          happening to you,
          that life has not forgotten you,
          that it holds you in its hand
          and will not let you fall.

(from Letter to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke,
transl. Stephen Mitchell, New York, Vintage Books, 1986)

A Sabbath Poem (Dylan)

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'
~ by Bob Dylan, our public prophet, y. 1964

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

You can dowload this poem in a form of a song from iTunes by clicking here.

A Sabbath Poem (Tagore)

      TAKE, O TAKE
      ~ by Rabindranath Tagore

      Time after time I came to Your gate with raised hands,
      asking for more and yet more.

      You gave and gave, now in slow measure, now in sudden
      excess.

      I took some, and some things I let drop; some lay
      heavy on my hands; some I made into playthings and
      broke them when I tired, till the wrecks and the hoard
      of Your gifts grew immense, hiding You, and the
      ceaseless expectation wore my heart out.

      "Take, O take" has now become my cry.

      Hold my hands; raise me from the still-gathering heap
      of Your gifts into the bare infinity of Your uncrowded
      presence.

(from the The Heart of God, poems selected and editied by Herbert F. Vetter) > Thank you Helme Silvet for sending this poem to me. Samir <

A Sabbath Poem (Neruda)

      from KEEPING STILL
      ~ by Pablo Neruda

      If we were not single-minded
      about keeping our lives moving,
      and for once could do nothing,
      perhaps a huge silence
      might interrupt this sadness
      of never understanding ourselves
      and of threatening ourselves with death.

(from Extravagaria, Pablo Neruda, transl. Alistair Reid, Noonday Press, 2001)

A Sabbath Poem (Whyte)

      SELF-PORTRAIT
      ~ by David Whyte

      It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
      or many gods.

      I want to know if you belong or feel
      abandoned.
      If you know the despair or can see it in others.
      I want to know
      if you are prepared to live in the world
      with its harsh need
      to change you. If you can look back
      with firm eyes
      saying this is where I stand. I want to know
      if you know
      how to melt into that fierce heat of living
      falling toward
      the center of your longing. I want to know
      if you are willing
      to live, day by day, with the consequences of love
      and the bitter
      unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

      I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
      the gods speak of God.

(from Fire in the Earth, by David Whyte, 1992)

A Sabbath Poem (Chaplin)

      DARE NOT SPEAK
      ~ by Ralph Chaplin (conscientious objector during WWI)

      Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie,
      Dust unto dust—
      The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die
      As all men must;

      Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell,
      Too strong to strive—
      Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
      Buried alive;

      But rather mourn the apathetic throng,
      The coward and the meek—
      Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong
      And dare not speak.

(from Bruderhof, Daily Dig)

A Sabbath Poem (St. Augustine)

      IN PRAISE OF DANCING
      ~ by St. Augustine

      I praise the dance, for it frees people
          from the heaviness of matter
          and binds the isolated to community.
      I praise the dance, which demands everything:
          health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
      Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people,
          who are in constant danger of becoming all brain,
          will, or feeling.
      Dancing demands a whole person, one who is
          firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is
          not obsessed by lust for people and things
          and the demon of isolation in his own ego.
      Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates
          with the balance of all his powers.
      I praise the dance.
      O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven
          will not know what to do with you.

(source: Bruderhof, Daily Dig)

A Sabbath Poem (Updike)

      PERFECTION WASTED
      ~ by John Updike
       ... grieving with the Virginia Tech community

      And another regrettable thing about death
      is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
      which took a whole life to develop and market--
      the quips, the witticisms, the slant
      adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
      the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
      in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
      their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
      their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
      their response and your performance twinned.
      The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
      in the rapid-access life. The whole act.
      Who will do it again? That's it: no one,
      imitators and descendants aren't the same.

(from Good Poems, selected by Garrison Keillor, Penguin, 2002)

A Sabbath Poem (Robbins)

      A MILESTONE
      ~ by Jessica Robbins, CA

      I find myself living opposites at the same time
            Healthier and stronger than I ever thought possible
            Spent and weaker than I ever expected

      “I have longed to tell my story and pour my tears to you
            Or just sit silently
            With pain too heavy to hold on my own.”

      I have done things I am ashamed of
            I fail my own ideals, I believe in lies
            Facing the prospect of stumbling like this for the rest of my days

      I don’t live with certainty anymore
            Hope is my theology, my religion
            That there is a God
            Who has compassion for me

            Who can see
            And looks

            At me,
            Feeling love, and not regret

(thank you Jess for sharing your poem with us)