Poetry We Love

A LAY OF THE HIGHER LAW

How then shall man so order life

That when his tale of years is told

Like sated guest he wend his way

How shall his even tenor hold?

Be true to nature and thyself

Fame nor disfame, hope not nor fear

Enough to hear the still small voice

Aye, thund’ring in thine inner ear.

From self approval seek applause

What ken not men thou kennest, thou!

Spurn every idol others raise

Before thine own Ideal bow

To seek the true, to glad the heart

Such is of life the Higher Law

Whose difference is a man’s degree:

The Man of Gold, the man of straw

Excerpted from Richard Burton’s Kasidah
This was Gil’s favorite poem.

A SLEEP OF PRISONERS

The human heart can go the lengths of God…

Dark and cold we may be, but this

Is no winter now. The frozen misery

Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise is exploration into God.

Where are you making for? It takes

So many thousand years to wake…

But will you wake, for pity’s sake?

Christopher Fry
Heard first from Jean Houston

THE UNDRESSING

The moment you accept what troubles

you’ve been given, the door will open.

Welcome difficulty, as a familiar comrade.

Joke with torment brought by the Friend.

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes

and jackets that serve to cover,

and then are taken off.

That undressing,

and the naked body underneath,

is the sweetness that comes after grief.

Rumi

PATIENT TRUST

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

VALENTINE TO
MID LIFE WOMAN

Mid life woman
you are not
invisible to me.
I seem to see
beneath your face
all the women
you have ever been.

Midlife woman
I have grown with you
secretly,
in another parallel,
breathing with you
as you breathed,
seeing with you
as you see,
lining my face
with an earned care
as you lined yours,
waiting for you,
as it seems
you waited for me.

I see your
inner complexion
breathing beneath
your outward gaze,
I see all your lives
and all your loves,
it must be for you
that I wanted to become
more generous,
a better man
than ever I could be
when young,
let me join all your
present giving
and all your receiving,

through you I learn
the full imagination
of every previous affection.

Mid life woman
you are not
invisible to me,
in you
I see a young girl,
lifting her face to the sky,
I see the young woman
in haloed light,
full and strong,
standing before
the altar of time,
waiting for her chosen.

I see the mother in you,
in your past
or in some yet
to be understood
future,
I see you
adoring and
I see you adored,
and now,
when I call your name
I want to see
day by day,
the woman
you will become
with me.

Mid-life woman
come to me now,
I see you more clearly
than all
the airbrushed
girls of the world.

I became a warrior
only to earn
your present
mature affection,
I bear my scars to you,
my eyes are lined
to smile with you
and I come to you
uncultivated
and unshaven
walking rough
and wild through rain
and wind and I pace
the mountain
all night
in my happy,
magnificence
at finding you.

Mid life woman,
In the dark of the night
I take you in my arms
and in that embracing
invisibility feel all of your
inner lives made touchable
and visible again.

Mid-life woman
I have earned
my ability to adore you.

Mid life woman
you are not invisible to me.
Come to me now
and let me kiss passionately
all the beautiful women
who have
ever lived in you.

My promise
is to you now
and all their future lives.

MID LIFE WOMAN
from
‘THE SEA IN YOU’ :
Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love’
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press