What Good is a Book of Poems? by Hafez

What good is a book of poems if you are
reading it while riding

in the back of a wagon that is heading toward
the edge of a cliff?

A greater awareness is what our relationship
is supposed to be about.

I was hoping something I might have said by
now could have made you stop, get your bearings,

and start traveling in a direction that will yield
lots of fruit. May be you are? That would be nice.

A Year with Hafiz- Daily Contemplations - Daniel Landinsky

What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte

What to Remember When Waking

by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?

In the trees beyond the house?

In the life you can imagine for yourself?

In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press