FOR THE TME OF NECESSARY DECISION

in

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

John O’Donohue

EXIT INTERVIEW

in

We sit across this desk,
but outside the office window 
stands a tree doing what all trees do 
and have done, many times each October.

We have no way of knowing 
if its limbs had grown weary, or what it heard 
to signal that now was the time, or whether 
there was any internal decision making 
that brought about the arrival of this moment.

We just have a tree out there on a grey wednesday 
co-operating, releasing yesterday’s 
prolific profusions, allowing the only life it has 
to be ordered by the ending of a season—willing 
now to no longer be laden, willing 
now to be latent.

We know this will keep happening every year, 
which has never once been strange 
for those living things who are always dying 
and living and letting go.

Lance Odegard

SLOW SUNRISE

in

Somehow in your sleep
you’ve grown up
grown deep

Each morning layers
of your life
stack, shift, grow
and have become
eleven years of life

You lie asleep in
a blue van thirty years
older than you
that you once dreamed and
that dream came true

The slow sunrise
across the sand dunes
happens every day
with or without notice
and shifts over time
becoming something new

You wake and stretch
your have grown up
grown deep
and I love the
little girl you’ve
become today

Jared Ray Mackey
15, July, 2020

UNEARTHING

in

To be born
a certain shade
a certain time
a certain place
gives or takes
chances, glances

The invisible institution
that taught
without words
formed a foundation
for me to stand
but another to suffer

Re-formation and
transformation require
unearthing efforts
seeing what was
hidden and hardened

Hope gains
ground slowly
the plow digs in
tilling and turning
allowing seeds
of all shades
to grow and
to gather

Jared Ray Mackey

II

in

When my father was an old man,
past eighty years, we sat together
on the porch in silence
in the dark. Finally he said,
“Well, I have had a wonderful life, “
adding after a long pause,
“and I have had nothing
to do with it!” We were silent
for a while again. And then I asked,
“Well, do you believe in the
informed decision?” He thought
some more, and at last said
out of the darkness: “Naw!”
He was right, for when we choose
the way by which our only life
is lived, we choose and do not know
what we have chosen, for this
is the heart’s choice, not the mind’s;
to be true to the heart’s one choice
is the long labor of the mind.
He chose, imperfectly as we must,
the rule of love, and learned
through years of light what darkly
he had chosen: His life, his place,
our place, our lives. And now comes
one he chose, but will not see:
Emily Rose, born May 2, 1993

Wendell Berry
This Day

VI

in

A man is lying on a bed
in a small room in the dark.
Weary and afraid, he prays
for courage to sleep, to wake
and work again; he doubts
that waking, when he wakes,
will recompense his sleep.
His prayers lean upward
on the dark and fall
like flares from a catastrophe.
He is a man breathing the fear
of hopeless prayer, prayed
in hope. He breathes the prayer
of his fear that gives a light
by which he sees only himself lying
in the dark, a low mound asking
almost nothing at all.
And then, long yet before dawn,
comes what he had not thought:
love that causes him to stir
like the dead in the grave, being
remembered—his own love or
Heaven’s, he does not know.
But now it is all around him;
it comes down upon him
like a summer rain falling
slowly, quietly in the dark.

Wendell Berry
This Day, VI

MORNINGS LIKE THIS

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Sunday. What still sunny days
We have now. And I alone in them.
So brief–our best!

So much is wrong, but not my hills.
I have been thinking of writing
A letter to the President of China.

Do it, do it, do it.
I beseech you, I beseech you,
I beseech you, I beseech you.

Mornings like this: I look
About the earth and the heavens:
There is not enough to believe–

Mornings like this. How heady
The morning air! How sharp
And sweet and clear the morning air!

Authentic winter! The odor of campfires!
Beans eighteen inches long!
A billion change–and I am here!

And here I lie in the quiet room
And read and read and read
So easy–so easy–so easy.

Pools in old woods, full of leaves.
Give me time enough in this place
And I will surely make a beautiful thing. 

Annie Dillard
Mornings Like This

A found poem: all text lifted and rearranged from David Grayson’s The Countryman’s Year, 1936

FOR THE INTERIM TIME

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When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely ion-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems TO believe the relief of dark.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might become free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transformed here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

John O’Donohue
To Bless The Space Between Us