Message from Eileen Pinto June 1, 2004

From: Eileen Pinto [mailto:eileenpinto@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 9:37 AM
To: pauline@angione.com
Subject: Poetry to share with Naz '66ers

Hi Pauline,

Our Edisto experience is still very much with me.  I've attached a few poems which I ask you to post on our site. They're a small gift to you and to our classmates -- may be familiar but are worth recalling.
Sent with my love.
Eileen

P.S. One other thing that has occurred to me. I'd like to offer an open invite to our friends who may be passing through here, may want to visit here, may want a getaway, etc. I love having visitors!! And as you know, the Twin Cities and MN have wonderful places appealing to diverse interests -- theater (Guthrie, Penumbra, Ordway, lots of others), shopping (Mall of America +++), the outdoors (Land of 10,000 + lakes), a fabulous State Fair (2nd biggest in the country), wonderful innovative libraries, etc. You are all most welcome!

            Why I Wake Early

                                by Mary Oliver

                            Hello, sun in my face.
                            Hello, you who make the morning
                            and spread it over the fields
                            and into the faces of the tulips
                            and the nodding morning glories,
                            and into the windows of, even, the
                            miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –

good morning, good morning, good morning,
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Now I Become Myself

By May Sarton

Now I become myself.  It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I’ve been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before – “

(What?  Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand;  the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song;
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
        love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

 Otherwise

 By Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise.  I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach.  It might
have been otherwise.
I took a dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate.  It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
At a table with silver
candlesticks.  It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

###

lr 2004 June2