Poetry

Poetry

“We learn to be like water, like the tide, like the river”.  
  
―Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip)

“Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.” 

―Barry Lopez

RÍO

Te percibo como un Río
Soberbio, caudaloso
De palabras, de matices
Azul, vertiginoso

Cerûleo e implacable
Sin límites visibles
De márgenes profundas
De imagines sensibles

Arrastras a tu paso
Opuesto a I vertiente
Las fueras de tu cauce
Sinousa tu corriente

El furor que no claudica
Tu vórtice explosive
Los oleajes que convergen
Y con ellos, yo contigo

Las aguas se agigantan
Me ensordece su bramido
Profetas de mi estruendo
Perdemos el sentido

Y todos los temores
Se agotan en la bruma
Cortina de la noche
Escudo de la luna

Los dos amalgamados
Un solo remolino
Después de mis trayectos
Encuentro lo perdido

―Daniel Gershenson

River

I perceive you as a River
Ever resonant and sinuous;
Of word and nuance begotten
Eternal and vertinous

Implacable and endless,
Uncertain of its course
Quite boundless in your limit
Profoundest at its source

You carry along its margin
Opposed to my own bank,
The strength of your wide sweep
The perils of your rank

Unvanquished and explosive
Your vortex augurs torment
Converging by your waves
Accepting of my current

Our waters are gigantic:
Enveloped by their roar
(Prophetic of my clamor)
They lose me to this war

Uncounted apprehensions
Soon vanquished by your flight
By lunar portents shielded
Dark curtain of the night

Us twinned: amalgamated,
With absences commended
A quintessential whirlpool
My searches now are ended.

―Daniel Gershenson

“Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. ” 

― Barry Lopez, "Crow and Weasel"


“I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life. Wherever I've traveled--Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan--I've found the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns,we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” 

― Barry Lopez


West of Your City

West of your city into the fern
sympathy, sympathy rolls the train
all through the night on a lateral line
where the shape of the game fish tapers down
from a reach where cougar paws touch water.

Corn that the starving Indians held
all through moons of cold for seed
and then they lost in stony ground
the gods told them to plant it in –
west of your city that corn still lives.

Cocked in that land tactile as leaves
wild things wait crouched in those valleys
west of your city outside your lives
in the ultimate wind, the whole land’s wave.
Come west and see; touch these leaves.

― William Stafford, 1955

ComParison

Both flower and star are similar:
A flower is a star on earth;
A star is a flower in the sky.
Both at first are lonely:
One star in a valley of blackness;
One flower in a sea of green;
Then others come up.
Both are created by someone above:
The star with its golden rays,
The flower with its golden petals.
― Diana Folsom, Grade 5
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