You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift to this world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life--

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~ William Stafford, "You Reading This, Be Ready" from "Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

"A skein of geese..." Aldo Leopold

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” 

~ Aldo Leopold

Rilke, "I Love The Dark Hours of My Being

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (untitled) "I Love the Dark Hours of My Being" from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Is My Soul Asleep by Antonia Machado

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that labor
at night stopped? And the water
wheel of thought,
is it dry, the cups empty,
wheeling, carrying only shadows?
No my soul is not asleep. 
It is awake, wide awake, 
It neither sleeps nor dreams but watches,
its clear eyes open
far-off things,
and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

~ Antonia Machado, "Is My Soul Asleep"

"...fierce with reality." ~ Florida Scott-Maxwell

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done … you are fierce with reality.” 

~ Florida Scott-Maxwell, 'The Measure of My Days'

"Keeping A Journal" by William Stafford

At night it was easy for me with my little candle
to sit late recording what happened that day. Sometimes
rain breathing in from the dark would begin softly
across the roof and then drum wildly for attention. 
The candle flame would hunger after each wafting
of air. My pen inscribed thin shadows that leaned
forward and hurried their lines along the wall. 

More important than what was recorded, these evenings
deepened my life: they framed every event
or thought and placed it with care by the others.
As time went on, that scribbled wall--even if
it stayed blank--became where everything
recognized itself and passed into meaning.

~ William Stafford, "Keeping A Journal" from Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

"Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. 

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye “Famous” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems