My Favorite Poetry

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected vistor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the sham, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

Won't You Take My
Hand In Trust

Walk With Me Into Darkness
A Path Never Taken

Into The Moonless Night
Lit With Diamonds

Feel The Cold Replaced
By Heat You Create

Reach Into Me And
Know My Soul

Open Your Entire
Being To Ecstasy

Stay Here In Time
For It Is But A Word

And This Moment
Will Continue For Eternity

I carry your heart
I carry it in my heart
I am never without it
Anywhere I go, you go
I fear no fate, for you are my fate
I want no world
For beautiful you
Are my world

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
Here is the root of the root
And the bud of the bud
And the sky of the sky
Of a tree called life
Which grows higher than soul can hope
Or mind can hide
And this is the wonder
That’s keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart
I carry it in my heart

Do you believe in angels
I didn’t

I met mine underground
Where men walk in the dark
And snakes are said to crawl

With the sprinkling shower of star dust I awoke.
Won’t you take my hand in trust
My angel asked

I said maybe
How could I trust another when I did not trust my Self
Now my angel is gone

Awake alone, salt drops wash my face
And like Swiss cheese
Inside there is a hole in my chest

So do you believe in angels
I carry mine in the holes of my Swiss cheese

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.  My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                    But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
…
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
…
Allow but little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time is time conquered.

Yes.
This poem is for you.
You said no more communications.
But I communicate
every day and every night
through silence
that hurts more than pain can speak
when pushing you away
pulls me in.
I seal my yearning
in a bottle
and send it
over the horizon
and into the seas
in the hopes that some day
you will uncork this bottle
and I will see
your smiling and crying face
again.

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

“The seed of mystery lies in muddy water.
How can I perceive this mystery?
Water becomes still through stillness.
How can I become still?
By flowing with the stream.”

Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

“I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every moment holy.
 I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.”

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.  In my end is my beginning.

They say if one understands himself, he understands all people. But I say to you, when one loves people, he learns something about himself.

We know separation so well because we’ve tasted the union. The reed flute makes music because it has already experienced changing mud and rain and light into sugarcane. Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can’t tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

“To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.  I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.