On Mondays when the museums are closed
and a handful of guards
look the other way
or read their newspapers
all of the figures
step out of golden frames
to stroll the quiet halls
or visit among old friends.
Picasso's twisted ladies
rearrange themselves
to trade secrets
with the languid odalisques of Matisse
while sturdy Rembrandt men
shake the dust
from their velvet tams
and talk shop.
Voluptuous Renoir women
take their rosy children by the hand
to the water fountains
where they gossip
while eating Cezanne's luscious red apples.
Even Ven Gogh
in his tattered yellow straw hat
seems almost happy
on Monday when the museum is closed.

-- Marilyn Donnelly

   from Coda 2010

May the long time sun
Shine upon you,
All love surround you,
And the pure light within you
Guide your way on.

-- from the Irish Blessing and Kundalini prayer

Sung by Snatum Kaur

The contemporary Hindu saint Sri Anandamayi Ma (30 April 1896 - 27 August 1982) wrote:
"the supreme calling of every human being is to aspire to self realization.  All other obligations are secondary."

Healing and divine bliss were among her many mantras to change the world.

She came to me in a dream and today happened to be her birthday.

New friend, old friend:  thanks for coming back to me.

"The most perfect flower the Indian soil has ever produced."
-- Swami Sivananda

Traveler,
From whence do you come?
And where do you go?
The moon has set,
But the sun has not yet risen.
In the chaos of darkness before dawn
Seeking the light,
I advance
To dispel the dark clouds from my mind
To find a great tree unbowed by the tempest
I emerge from the Earth.

-- Daisaku Ikeda
    from "The Human Revolution"

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass and the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches.  No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes.  I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east.  Then it poured
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold.  Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave.  The peonies are up, the red sprouts
burning in circles like birthday candles,

for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.
There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked me if I would be sad when it happened

and I am sad.  But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots
green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,
as if spring were a feast.  I thank you for that.
Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.

-- Ted Kooser
    from "Delights and Shadows'

Everything I thought I wanted
is right here,
particularly when the sun
is making such a comeback,

and the lilac engorged
with purple has recovered
from its severed pruning,
and you will be back soon

to dispel whatever it is
that overtakes me like leaf blight,
even on a day like this.  I can still
hear remnants of the rain

in the swollen stream
behind the house, in the faint
dripping under the eaves,
persistent as memory.

And all he things I didn't think
I wanted, cut like the lilac back
to the root, push up again
from underground.

--  Linda Pastan
      from "Traveling Light" 2011

"When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce.
You look for reasons it is not doing well.  It may need fertilizer, or more water,
or less sun.  You never blame the lettuce.

Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person.
But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce.

Blaming has no positive effect at all. nor does trying to persuade using reason
and argument.  That is my experience.  No blame, no reasoning, no argument,
just understanding.  If you understand, and you show you can understand,
you can love, and the situation will change."

--  Thich Nhat Hanh

After midnight the blizzard howls itself out,
the wind sleeps, a tired lover.
Before bed, I think of you
and play the Meistersinger quintet
over and over, singing
along on all the parts,
dancing through the house
like a polar bear who thinks
it has joined the ballet.
You are in my arms, dancing too;
whirling from room to room;
frost crusted on the window
begins to glow like lit up faces.
My five fingers, now on fire
like these five voices singing,
imagine touching the skin
over your shoulders.

--  Bill Holm
     from "Playing the Black Piano"  2004

We couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen,
sitting on the green bench
in the late sixties or early seventies
me and Michael Zucker
who was much more savvy and world-weary than I.
When I asked him to please explain
the meaning of the works to a song by Carly Simon
who was simply gorgeous
after we'd resolved the essential question
of whether or not she was wearing a bra
in that photo of her with the blue top and thick lips
on her album cover.
"I don't get it" I said.
"You're so vain.  You probably think this song is about you."
But the song IS about him, isn't it? I asked Zucker
holding my palm up in the air
like one who is trying to ascertain the truth
about whether or not it has started to rain.
Zucker looked away then,
gingerly fingering the green slats
as though he were reading the carved names
of the lovers and the obscenities tactually.
Then he took a deep breath
and exhaled miserably,
took the album cover out of my hands
and gazed awhile at Carly Simon
who was gorgeous,
famous, braless,
and older than me and Zucker together.
"That's the point," he said. 
"She's in love with him."

-- Paul Hostovsky
    from "A Little in Love a Lot"  2011

And to the south lived dear old Mrs. Miller,
the first next door neighbor I really knew.
A doctor's widow.  White-streaked, yellow hair.
With a nervous New York way of talking
though she'd lived out West for twenty years.

A grown daughter - Dorothy - lived with her,
worked somewhere, drove a red sports car.
Fruit trees grew behind their gabled house
and a crunching path of white crushed stone
ended at a Japanese-style fishpond.

I was tall enough then to climb the bamboo fence
and pull oranges from the tree that overhung
their pond.  What fruit I couldn't reach, fell.
In January, you'd see lazy, blurred goldfish
tailing beneath navels floating on the pond.

Saturdays, I'd wash Mrs. Miler's Buick
with a bucket, soap, and a sponge.  The fifteen cents
she paid was good money in '61.  Later, on the lanai,
she'd pour my coke, wave away her cigarette smoke,
and engage me in grown-up conversation.

"Since nothing ever goes according to plan," she'd say,
"You'd think we'd figure out the plan."
I was at most eleven.  She was a drunk, I suppose.
Confused, but open-hearted.  Lonely, of course.
The first person like me I'd known.

-- Charles Douthat
   from "Blue for Oceans" 2010