The Poetry Corner

Wendell Berry

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

and when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey."

Allow

There is no controlling life.

Try corralling a lightning bolt,

containing a tornado. Dam a

stream and it will create a new

channel. Resist, and the tide

will sweep you off your feet.

Allow, and grace will carry

you to higher ground. The only

safety lies in letting it all in –

the wild and the weak; fear,

fantasies, failures and success.

When loss rips off the doors of

the heart, or sadness veils your

vision with despair, practice

becomes simply bearing the truth.

In the choice to let go of your

known way of being, the whole

world is revealed to your new eyes

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” 

Now is the Time

Now is the time.

Now is the time to know 

that all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider

a lasting truce with yourself and God?

Now is the time to understand

that all your ideas of right and wrong

were just a child’s training wheels

to be laid aside

when you can finally live

with veracity and love.

Now is the time for the world to know

that every thought and action is sacred.

That this is the time

for you to compute the impossibility

that there is anything 

but Grace.

Now is the season to know

that everything you do

is Sacred

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing,

you must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

Craftsmanship and Emptiness

I've said before that every craftsman

searches for what's not there

to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole

where the roof caved in.  A water carrier

picks the empty pot.  A carpenter

stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint

of emptiness, which they then

start to fill.  Their hope, though,

is for emptiness, so don't think

you must avoid it.  It contains

what you need!

Dear soul, if you were not friends

with the vast nothing inside,

why would you always be casting your net

into it, and waiting so patiently?

This invisible ocean has given you such abundance,

but still you call it "death,"

that which provides you sustenance and work.

God has allowed some magical reversal to occur,

so that you see the scorpion pit

as an object of desire,

and all the beautiful expanse around it

as dangerous and swarming with snakes.

This is how strange your fear of death

and emptiness is, and how perverse

the attachment to what you want.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest-house.

Every morning a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor. 

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture. 

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you

out for some new delight. 

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Trust your wound to a teacher's surgery. 

Flies collect on a wound. They cover it, 

those flies of your self-protecting feelings, 

your love for what you think is yours. 

Let a teacher wave away the flies 

and put a plaster on the wound. 

Don't turn your head. Keep looking 

at the bandaged wound. That's where 

the light enters you. 

And don't believe for a moment 

that you're healing yourself.

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it.
That No will behead us
and shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
besides ourselves, and only that, so
miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
we shall be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
we shall be a mighty kindness.

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired

as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts

from books and from what the teacher says, 

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others

in regard to your competence in retaining

information.  You stroll with this intelligence

in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more

marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox.  A freshness

in the center of the chest.  This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate.  It's fluid,

and it doesn't move from outside to inside

through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

"Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work."

The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune

Wisdom is having things right in your life

and knowing why.

If you do not have things right in your life

you will be overwhelmed:

you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

If you have things right in your life

but do not know why,

you are just lucky, and you will not move

in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives

who are acting to make things right for others:

they act only from the self—

and that self will never be right:

no luck, no help, no wisdom

This short poem speaks eloguently about some hidden facets of wisdom.  As a doctor who, at various times in my career, was "not right in my own life, but who was trying to make things right for others," I experienced suffering.  I was acting heroically, but not wisely.  I wish I had recognized this at the time and gotten more in balance.  – KW

The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow.

It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can't get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.

You don't ever let go of the thread.

I find this poem helpful as a clinician because the idea of the thread reminds me that the most important things in healthcare never change.  Technology and medical practice are in a constant flux, but the essentials of empathy, compassion, openness, and presence will never become out-dated.  They are the threads that we can follow confidently as guides in our work.  – KW

Compassion

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it.

What appears bad manners,

an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things

no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.

You do not know what wars are going on

down there where the spirit meets the bone.