Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "A Blessing for Wedding", Come, Thief: Poems
A good question can send you on a long journey in rain and cold. It can terrify, bringing you straight into your own fears, whether of heights or of loss or of all the mysteries that never go away--our own vulnerability, the heart's utter exposure, the capriciousness and fragility of events, of relationships, of existence.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Living by Questions", Oprah
Never surrender a good question for a mere answer.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Living by Questions", Oprah
In times of darkness and direness, a good question can become a safety rope between you and your own sense of selfhood: A person who asks a question is not wholly undone by events. She is there to face them, to meet them. If you’re asking a question, you still believe in a future.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Living by Questions", Oprah
Poetry, and art in general, often counterbalance the main tenor of a culture. They carry different truths, as the Fool does in the court of a king. They puncture power and purpose’s narrowing of view. We lean towards the purposive and practical, not just as humans, but as mammals. Poetry reveals another set of values, which equally matter, and make life bearable in ways that it otherwise would not be. Kindness, astonishment, seeing the beauty in darkness and grief, seeing the darkness in beauty and joy, finding solace in the knowledge that you live a life others have also known. Utilitarianism alone is a cruel and strictured measure of a life.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, interview, Poetry Northwest, July 11, 2015
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "On the Fifth Day"
Little soul,
you and I will become
the memory
of a memory of a memory.
A horse
released of the traces
forgets the weight of the wagon.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Harness"
One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Optimism"
I waited though wanting nothing,
then waited longer.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Lure"
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Sweater"
Little soul,
you have wandered
lost a long time.
The woods all dark now,
birded and eyed.
Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "Amor Fati"
Where you find poems in most people's lives is at weddings and at funerals. Poems are turned to in the great transitions of a life, when we are at sea amid changes too vast to feel in any way the master of. One of the things poems do is demonstrate that you aren't alone -- that other humans have been here before, and have found a way to sustain aliveness, to find beauty within the condition of grief. And this allows you to go on.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
