Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Awakening

“If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place?.... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." --Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904” ― Franz Kafka

My heart in your hands by Louise Docker

 

 If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 

"What you are doing to me is not just," 

you may touch and awaken at its source

 the spirit of attention and love... ~ Simone Weil

“When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.”

― P.D. Ouspensky

Sculpture of the Buddha meditating under the Bodhi Tree, 800 C.E.

  Midweek Motif ~ Awakening

Awakening is more than waking after sleep, it involves coming to a realization that is personally transforming.  It may be rational, but more often the path is visceral, emotional or spiritual.  

Have you had an awakening?  

Where is one needed?

Take us there in today's poem. 

Frances MacDonald - The Sleeping Princess 1896

The Waking

By Theodore Roethke
 

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

Excerpt from "To Begin With, the Sweet Grass"

by Mary Oliver
  

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
. . . . 

 
  7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
 

(Read the rest HERE 

or in Mary Oliver's book Evidence: Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.)

Waking from Sleep

By Robert Bly
 

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,

Tiny explosions at the waterlines,

And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.

Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full

Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!

Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,

Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.

Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;

We know that our master has left us for the day.

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(Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Longing.)