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We who still labor by the cromlech on the shore
and the grey cairn on the hill, 
when the day sinks drowned in dew, 
growing weary of the world's empires
bow down to you,
master of the still stars 
and of the flaming door.

                
W.B.Yeats  
from Valley of the Black Pig





We can make our minds so still like water
that beings gather about us, that they may see,
it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life, because of our quiet.


W.B.Yeats
from Celtic Twilight, 1902 

CaptData, youtube, 2008                                      

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The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
So many garish lamps in the dying brain’s lamp-show,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on the essence, concentrate on the Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams towards you from all things,
All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
but the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things.
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.

Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
Translated by Kabir Helminski

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A Ritual to Read to Each Other
 WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home,  we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe --
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 by William Stafford.

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