For over a decade I used to assemble and send out some favorite poems to a select group of friends at the start of the New Year. Twitter, which has basically destroyed my blogging career, has supplanted that practice for the last couple of years. But 2012, a year that promises to be perhaps the most tumultuous one we’ve witnessed yet, seems to be as good a time as any to transfer the practice to the web and allow whomever finds these poems the opportunity to enjoy them.
I am not the kind of person who makes New Year’s resolutions – see Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s excellent book: How The Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work for more background on why I did that – I am renewing my commitment to return to blogging. As much as I love twitter, it does not allow me the same kind of creative outlet that long form blogging does. So, welcome to 2012, check back now and again to see what is new here, enjoy these poems and do whatever it takes to have your best year yet!
Peace,
Ken
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A Story That Could Be True
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.
He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by—
you wonder at their calm.
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”—
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
~ William Stafford
A Friend of the Family.
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They.
~ Rudyard Kipling
A Sleep of Prisoners
The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size
The enterprise
Is exploration unto God.
What are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity sake?
~ Christopher Fry
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Zero
Hafiz
Zero
Is where the Real Fun starts
There’s too much counting
Everywhere else!
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Keeping Quiet
Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still for once on the face of the earth, let’s not speak in any language; let’s stop for a second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…
If we were not so 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.
Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.
“Here’s the whole story in one line. This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise:
You take hydrogen gas and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes and giraffes and people.”
~Brian Swimme, Mathematical Cosmologist
What if the World Awakes?
A short trip through five billion years…
What if elements orbiting around our Sun awakes Orbiting Elements World?
What if Orbiting Elements World awakes Fire World?
What if Fire World awakes Water World?
What if Water World awakes Earth World?
What if Earth World awakes Air World?
What if Air World awakes Life World?
What if Life World awakes Plant World?
What if Plant World awakes Animal World?
What if Animal World awakes People World?
What if People World awakes Sacred World?
What if Sacred World awakes Your World?
What if Your World awakes The World?
What if The World Awakes You?
What Do You Awake?
Ken Homer
8/10/07
