“Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end
of his life, found the names
of familiar objects escaping him.”

Lawrence Raab

“I want to be drenched in cold water,
to be fully saturated,
to explode into a nap,
to share a piece of truth so true
that it shakes the schemas we've schemed —
most of all the divisions.”

Jane Klinger

“Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.”

Lynn Ungar

“The world is too grand to reshape with babble.”

Jim Harrison

"Linguistic repetition, you learn from an early age, can give form or take it away, because it forces a confrontation with the malleability of language and the world we build with it, build upon it."

Ben Lerner

Birds lack the words to get tangled up in the whys. 

"After you read a poem just knowing you can hold it, you can be in that space of the poem. And it can hold you in its space."

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

An attention exercise on the theme of rest barely disguised as a poem.

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Louise Glück

First, you must let your heart
be broken open
in a way you have never
felt before,
cannot imagine.

Dorothy Walters

"Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been."

~ Mark Strand

Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.

Denise Levertov

I swoon and recoil at the tresses blowing
in an arbor without glow
or flame. These are reprieves. Respites
in the demands of sensation
and flow. Know this: you can you can
you can you can you can.

~ Margot Schilpp

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

Rumi

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. 

"Maybe Humpty Dumpty jumped."

Rabbi Irwin Kula

It makes me feel alone
to answer to a name
I've never used.

“What would people look like
if we could see them as they are…”

Ellen Bass