a poem by robert bringhurst

Kol Nidre*

Forgive me my promises. Those I have kept

and those I have broken. Forgive me

my pledges, my vows and the rest

of my boasts and concessions.

Raking my father's bones out of the long furnace, I knew

that what is is what links us. The ground

we all walk on, air we all breathe;

the rocks and trees that look down on us in all their candour -

all that remains of all that surrounded us when we were sane -

and the eyes; the hands; the silence; reciting the names

of what is in the world; divining the names

of what isn't; the wounds we inflict

to relay and mirror the wounds we receive;

and the knots we cannot undo

between father and son, daughter and mother,

mother and father, the one

God and all his believers:

the marriage made without vows

between those who have pleased

and hurt one another that deeply.

Bringhurst, Robert. "Kol Nidre" The Calling: Selected Poems 1970-1995. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995.

* n. Judaism

1. An opening prayer recited on the eve of Yom Kippur, retroactively or preemptively declaring the annulment of all personal vows made to God in the previous or following year.
2. The melody to which such a prayer is chanted.

one more day by czeslaw milosz

One More Day

Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood.

In a child's nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth,

In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast's fangs and in the terror of dark rooms,

In youthful infatuations where childhood delight find completion.

And should we discredit the idea for its modest origins?

Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living

And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us?

Yes, good is an ally of being and the mirror of evil is nothing,

Good is brightness, evil darkness, good high, evil low,

According to the nature of our bodies, of our language.

The same could be said of beauty. It should not exist.

There is not only no reason for it, but an argument against.

Yet undoubtedly it is, and is different from ugliness.

The voices of birds outside the window when they greet the morning

And iridescent stripes of light blazing on the floor,

Or the horizon with a wavy line where the peach-colored sky and the dark-blue mountain meet.

Or the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green.

All that, hasn't it been invoked for centuries

As mystery which, in one instant, will be suddenly revealed?

And the old artist thinks that all his life he has only trained his hand.

One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a flower.

And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.

Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,

It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence

And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil

Only beauty will call to them and save them

So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false.

Milosz, Czeslaw. "One More Day" New and Collected Poems 1931-2001. New York" HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 2001.

of politics, & art - a poem by norman dubie

Of Politics, & Art

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula

The winter storm

Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.

Mrs. Whitimore, dying

Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark

Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment

Of sea hunting

Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves

At the still and protected center

Of a great herd of whales

Where all the females floated on their sides

While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers

Just stared into what they allowed

Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's

One visible eyeball.

And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say

That Melville might

Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"

The first responded, "Because there are

No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.

Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.

There was a blue light on her face, breasts and arms.

Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying

Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room

With thirty children

Rapt, confident and listening to the pure

God rendering voice of a storm.

Dubie, Norman. "Of Politics, & Art" The Best American Poetry 1990. Don Mills: Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc., 1990.

one more scott cairns poem for the road

After the Last Kiss

By now I'm dead. Make what you will of that.

But granted you are alive, you will need

to be making some more as well. Prayers

have been made, for instance but (trust me)

the dead are oblivious to such late sessions.

Settle instead for food, common meals of thick soup.

Invite your friends. Make lively conversation

among steaming bowls, lifting heavy spoons.

If there is bread (there really must be bread),

tear it coarsely and hand each guest his share

for intinction in the soup. Something to say?

Say it now. Let the napkin fall and stay.

Kiss each guest when it comes to time for parting.

They may be embarrassed, caught without wit

or custom. (See them shifting from foot to

foot at the open door?) Could be you will

repeat your farewells a time or two more

than seems fit. But had you not embraced them

at such common departures, your prayers will

fall as dry crumbs, nor will they comfort you.

Cairns, Scott. "After the Last Kiss" philokalia: new & selected poems. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo Press, 2002.

a poem by heberto padilla

A Fountain, a House of Stone

(Zurbaran)

A fountain, a house of stone,
a bridge, a chapel with a weather vane
and a squeaking hinge in the door,
a road bordered by flowers
and, farther on, a river.

Can we describe the world this way,
eyes wide open, shoes up on the table
with a dusky halo like a lantern,
and the still face, distant and ever-demanding,
nailing us down with its eyes,
hunting down in our innards
the cowardly swagger of allegory?
It is possible. The world can be described
in any way you like. You might
come out with one last twist of the facts, as they say,
our last coin
to take us back again to that river
that attends our childhood as it does old age.
One might cross the bridge
among the bamboo which creaks once again
like a bridge across a river,
in such a way that the hinge we have hung on to
since we were children
becomes stronger as time passes.
The house, the road bordered by flowers, and the chapel
thereby belong to us,
or we belong to them. It's all the same.

Translated from the Spanish by the Alastair Reid and Alexander Coleman

Padilla, Heberto. "A Fountain, a House of Stone" The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.