This Impossible Math – The Grace and Rightness You Were Minus the Wrong You Were, Equals, What? I grieve to speak of love and yet not love as I should. I ask forgiveness of the many I have wounded And of the many I have passed without seeing their wounds. Pray for me, my brother […]
Tag Archives: Robert Bly
A Poem – My Response to the News of the Sexual and Relationship Abuse of Women by the Once-Celebrated Canadian Jean Vanier
March 2, 2020 – 12:39 pm
The Bigness of Small Poems – # 7 in a Series – Robert Bly
April 25, 2016 – 12:36 pm
Walking on the Shore in Late August I look out over the muddy lake. All at once I see a fin rise, what alertness! All my brain power pours toward that spot on the water. How we long for a bit of consciousness to appear above the water! Now I notice what I have never […]
The Cost of Refusal – A Poem by Robert Bly (and another by Rilke)
March 20, 2016 – 2:23 pm
What does refusal look like? Refusal to look at our shadow side, our rejected aspects, good and bad; and/or refusal to live on the borderlands of our lives, and past them, into our greatest fullness? American poet Robert Bly (1926 – ) symbolizes this or these refusals, strikingly in this poem: And the toe of […]
Grief-struck Remedies – Poems on Sorrow and Grief
June 14, 2013 – 3:23 pm
A merganser is clucking in front of me in a little bay near our cabin on Cortes Island, B.C. I call it clucking but it sounds also like little honks. So much my ear and mouth cannot translate. Oh! This untranslatable world. Even a wing. A prayer. These mysteries that take flight- impossible the realities […]
An Alphabet of Poets – V is for Vallejo
May 14, 2012 – 8:15 pm
AND WHAT IF AFTER And what if after so many words the word itself doesn’t survive! And what if after so many wings of birds the stopped bird doesn’t survive! It would be better then, really, if it were all swallowed up, and let’s end it! To have been born only to live off […]
An Alphabet of Poets – U is for Unamuno
May 6, 2012 – 12:20 pm
Throw Yourself Like Seed Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit; sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate that brushes your heel as it turns going by, the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant. Now you are only giving food to that final pain which […]
An Alphabet of Poets- S is for Stafford
April 29, 2012 – 6:08 pm
Why I Am Happy Now has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent […]
An Alphabet of Poets – N is for Nowlen
April 19, 2012 – 12:06 am
Weakness Old mare whose eyes are like cracked marbles, drools blood in her mash, shivers in her jute blanket . My father hates weakness worse than hail; in the morning without haste he will shoot her in the ear, once, shovel her under in the north pasture. Tonight leaving the stables, he stands […]
An Alphabet of Poets – I is for Ignatow (and Bly)
April 13, 2012 – 7:39 pm
THREE IN TRANSITION (FOR WCW) I wish I understood the beauty in leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful as we go? I lie in the field still, absorbing the stars and silently throwing off their presence. Silently I breathe and die by turns. He was ripe and fell to the ground from a […]
An Alphabet of Poets – B is for Bly – Part II
April 4, 2012 – 2:20 pm
To celebrate National Poetry Month I am featuring a new poet for each day of April. I will be at my abecedarian best and go through the alphabet from a to z with a few letters getting more than one post! What Is Sorrow For? What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse Where we […]