Words

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia

Questionnaire

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

Wendell Berry

An Embarrassment

"Do you want to ask
the blessing?"

"No. If you do,
go ahead."

He went ahead:
his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes
rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft
thump.

If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party
a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

Wendell Berry

The first time I told you I loved you,
it was in a confessional
and I jumped as the words escaped my mouth.
The priest looked at me with his missing teeth
and his kind eyes, touched my arm
and told me that it was okay,
to let things be.

I think he thought I was scared.

Big hands,

he had big hands

and a really small heart.

That's how the saying goes,

doesn't it?

No, wait,

it's cold hands,

warm heart.

He had warm hands,

hot almost,

at least that's how they felt
as they traced my skin

and left ashes in their trail,

volcanic lava cascading 

in and out of my being

until all that was left

was a fossil,

dug out millions of years later

to reconstruct history.

Jehovah Jireh

The fear of uncertainty knits
itself into my veins,
and I can feel myself falter.

Breathing is hard.
I am so frail,
look a tremor, here and there.

I don't know what I can do,
patience,
patience one breath at a time.

Jehovah Jireh,
He will provide.
Have faith.

Faltering faith.
Jehovah Jireh,
my mouth can't stop trembling.

On my knees in my heart,
no more without You,
Jehovah Jireh,
God will provide.

Please don't take me away from here.

You said,
"Let's get married in Ireland."
And I agreed.
No mother, no father,
no sister, no guilt.
What a wonderful thought,
to be able to get married in Ireland.
I went to St. Patrick's as a kid, you know.
I can see it now,
the green of the fields.
I bet it'd be raining
and in love I'd look at you
in that old little stone church,
and we'd hear the bells ringing
and realise that now we were an and
and not an it,
not a he and she,
him and her,
just an and.
A conjunction, joined,
joining.
I would like to get married in Ireland now,
smell the ocean
and live together forever.
If these are only words,
let these be the holiest words I see.
Let's get married in Ireland,
no one else,
only you and me.

I was rejected four times today,
maybe five.
I was fine after the first two
and then I started getting irritable.
I spilled a drop of coffee
in the cafeteria downstairs
and wiped it with my sleeve so
no one would notice,
but I saw the old man sneer.
The third one, fourth one, fifth one,
all blended into a big red sign
that read "unworthy".
Hardly surprising.
It was hard to remind myself
 that I was made of stardust,
I felt rather that I was created
out of the dust of stars,
the careless sweeps of discarded material
from somewhere farther out than the sun.
But days go on as do the stars,
I burned my tongue.

Somewhere deep in me is unrest.
I am a mental vagabond,
jumping from universe to universe,
wanting to be part of all
and none of them.
I cannot sit still for a second,
can't you see my neurons firing
from Jupiter to Mars?
I want you to see,
I want you to see through me
and find Brasil, Indonesia, Cambodia.
I want you to listen to my heartbeat
and find the band
I wanted to start as a kid,
rising among the sea of french horns and trombones,
rising, rising.
Can you look at me and see all
the dreams I have left to dream about?
Can you look at me and
see all of my unfulfilled dreams?

What I'm Giving Up for Lent This Year

I'm giving up trying to be special. I'm not special.

I'm giving up trying to have a successful career. I'm giving up trying to want a successful career. You see, my brain knows what it's good at and what it wants to do. But I'm always not good enough. Not smart enough. Don't know the right people.

Maybe for Lent I'm not going to give up anything but accept the daily doses of humility. I will bow my head down again because it seems that is all I am called for in life.

Please don't tell me to try, I try. And I'm not hopeless or filled with despair, I am just coming to terms with the fact that there is no greater plan for me. Or maybe there is and I'm getting older and older without discerning what that is. And that probably is my fault, for straying off the right path and taking the wide road to my own gateway to hell (purgatory I am hoping).

What I'm saying is that for Lent I will try to accept it. I mean, I normally have to accept it (what else can you do but move on) but I will try to accept it with even more fervour than normal. I will realize that what I am drinking is bitter and I will not pretend it's sweet nor will I complain about the bitterness. A liquid is a liquid after all.

I'm giving up pizza and sweets. I'm giving up a part of myself. I know it's not a worthy part, it's not the part that can even be called Catholic anymore, but it is a part of myself. I have nothing else to offer the world.

On Faith

How do people stay true to each other?
When I think of my parents all those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
longing for anything else—or: no, they must
have longed; there must have been flickerings,
stray desires, nights she turned from him,
sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently,
smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath
and tangled limbs must have seemed
not enough. But it was. Or they just
held on. A gift, perhaps, I've tossed out,
having been always too willing to fly
to the next love, the next and the next, certain
nothing was really mine, certain nothing
would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;
faith that this latest love won't end, or ends
in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.
When he turns his back to me now, I think:
disappear. I think: not what I want. I think
of my mother lying awake in those arms
that could crush her. That could have. Did not.

Cecilia Woloch