Written by
Richard Jones |
All winter the fire devoured everything --
tear-stained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers.
When April finally arrived,
I opened the woodstove one last time
and shoveled the remains of those long cold nights
into a bucket, ash rising
through shafts of sunlight,
as swirling in bright, angelic eddies.
I shoveled out the charred end of an oak log,
black and pointed like a pencil;
half-burnt pages
sacrificed
in the making of poems;
old, square handmade nails
liberated from weathered planks
split for kindling.
I buried my hands in the bucket,
found the nails, lifted them,
the phoenix of my right hand
shielded with soot and tar,
my left hand shrouded in soft white ash --
nails in both fists like forged lightning.
I smeared black lines on my face,
drew crosses on my chest with the nails,
raised my arms and stomped my feet,
dancing in honor of spring
and rebirth, dancing
in honor of winter and death.
I hauled the heavy bucket to the garden,
spread ashes over the ground,
asked the earth to be good.
I gave the earth everything
that pulled me through the lonely winter --
oak trees, barns, poems.
I picked up my shovel
and turned hard, gray dirt,
the blade splitting winter
from spring. With hoe and rake,
I cultivated soil,
tilling row after row,
the earth now loose and black.
Tearing seed packets with my teeth,
I sowed spinach with my right hand,
planted petunias with my left.
Lifting clumps of dirt,
I crumbled them in my fists,
loving each dark letter that fell from my fingers.
And when I carried my empty bucket to the lake for water,
a few last ashes rose into spring-morning air,
ash drifting over fields
dew-covered
and lightly dusted green.
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Written by
Kobayashi Issa |
Even on the smallest islands,
they are tilling the fields,
skylarks singing.
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Written by
Thomas Hardy |
I
If seasons all were summers,
And leaves would never fall,
And hopping casement-comers
Were foodless not at all,
And fragile folk might be here
That white winds bid depart;
Then one I used to see here
Would warm my wasted heart!
II
One frail, who, bravely tilling
Long hours in gripping gusts,
Was mastered by their chilling,
And now his ploughshare rusts.
So savage winter catches
The breath of limber things,
And what I love he snatches,
And what I love not, brings.
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Written by
Rabindranath Tagore |
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance?
Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.
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Written by
Kobayashi Issa |
The crow
walks along there
as if it were tilling the field.
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Written by
Emily Dickinson |
I never hear that one is dead
Without the chance of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,
Too mighty for the Daily mind
That tilling its abyss,
Had Madness, had it once or twice
The yawning Consciousness,
Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue
When Terror were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike us instant Dead
I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger Consciousness
Deliberately face --
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Written by
Edna St. Vincent Millay |
These hills, to hurt me more,
That am hurt already enough,—
Having left the sea behind,
Having turned suddenly and left the shore
That I had loved beyond all words, even a song's words, to
convey,
And built me a house on upland acres,
Sweet with the pinxter, bright and rough
With the rusty blackbird long before the winter's done,
But smelling never of bayberry hot in the sun,
Nor ever loud with the pounding of the long white breakers,—
These hills, beneath the October moon,
Sit in the valley white with mist
Like islands in a quiet bay,
Jut out from shore into the mist,
Wooded with poplar dark as pine,
Like points of land into a quiet bay.
(Just in the way
The harbour met the bay)
Stricken too sore for tears,
I stand, remembering the Islands and the sea's lost sound—
Life at its best no longer than the sand-peep's cry,
And I two years, two years,
Tilling an upland ground!
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Written by
Emily Dickinson |
Bloom upon the Mountain -- stated --
Blameless of a Name --
Efflorescence of a Sunset --
Reproduced -- the same --
Seed, had I, my Purple Sowing
Should endow the Day --
Not a Topic of a Twilight --
Show itself away --
Who for tilling -- to the Mountain
Come, and disappear --
Whose be Her Renown, or fading,
Witness, is not here --
While I state -- the Solemn Petals,
Far as North -- and East,
Far as South and West -- expanding --
Culminate -- in Rest --
And the Mountain to the Evening
Fit His Countenance --
Indicating, by no Muscle --
The Experience --
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