When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

The Silver Swan

by Ben Jonson

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last,
And sung no more;
Farewell, all joys;
O,death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live,
More fools than wise.

The Dance

by William Carlos Williams

In Breughel’s great picture,
The Kermess,
The dancers go round,
They go round and around,
The squeal and the blare and the tweekle of bagpipes,
A bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies
(round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them.
Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds,
Swinging their butts,
Those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures
Prance as they dance,
In Breughel’s great picture, the Kermess.

Do I Love You

by Jack Larson

Do I love you more than the air?
Air used to seem just nothingness.
Through our love,
Now it seems no less than God’s air airing your life’s breath;
Too rich for space, too dear for death.
Through you.
And I love you more than the air.

To a Terrorist

For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness is another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse
doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.

The Dawn

I realize that the dawn
when we'll meet again
will never break,

so I give it up,
little by little, this love.

But something in me laughs
as I say this, someone

shaking his head and chuckling
softly, Hardly, hardly

--Rumi a la coleman barks...

When a Madman Smiles at You

by Rumi

Galen, the great physician,asked one of his assistants
to give him a certain medicine.
"Master, that medicine
is for crazy people! You're far from needing that!"

Galen: "Yesterday a madman turned and smiled at me,
did his eyebrows up and down and touched my sleeve.
He wouldn't have done that if he hadn't recognized
in me someone congenial."

Anyone that feels drawn,
for however short a time, to anyone else,
those two share a common consciousness.

It's only in the grave that unlike beings associate.
A wise man once remarked, "I saw a crow and a stork
flying together, and I couldn't understand it,
until I investigated and found what they shared.
They were both lame."

There's a reason why the beetle
leaves the rose garden. He can't stand
all that loveliness.

He wants to live in rotten dung,
not with nightingales and flowers.
Watch who avoids you.
That, too, reveals your inner qualities.

The mark of eternity in Adam was not only
that the angels bowed to him,
but that Satan wouldn't.