2 March 2020 – Guest Poets: America, Poland, and Japan

This month’s guest poets are from America, Poland, and Japan. As in the post of 13 January 2020, these three poets address the theme of mindfulness, a topic of ever-growing popularity from traditional Buddhist temples, to the temples of corporations dedicated to profit. The selections in this post are from a book titled, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, edited by John Brehm (Wisdom Publications 2017). The book is a treasure of spiritual inspiration on the three subjects of the title. This is the second post on mindfulness, and not the last I will share over the coming months. Later in the year, we will turn to impermanence and wisdom.

Mindfulness is a key Buddhist practice that places one right in the middle of living. Unlike the difficult emotions connected with impermanence, mindfulness can be both sad and joyful, as one absorbs the beauty and tragedy of the flow of events.

Editor, John Brehm, begins his “Introduction” with the statement, “Mindful attending is essential to these poems.” He goes on to say that, “This kind of seeing requires mindfulness – the intentional, nonjudging awareness of present-moment experience . . .  have found that looking intently, without judgment, at the most ‘insignificant things’ – hubcaps, weathered fence posts, gate latches, bolts on fire hydrants, weeds, trash on the street, and so on – has the most profoundly awakening effect.” Indeed, such things only make up all of our lives.

So, here you go . . . perhaps, again, consider mindfulness as you read

William Stafford (1914 - 1993) -- Listening 

My father could hear a little animal step,

or a moth in the dark against the screen,

and every far sound called the listening out

into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night

than came to our porch for us on the wind;

we would watch him look up and his face go keen

till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand

inviting the quiet by turning the face,

waiting for a time when something in the night

will touch us too from that other place.

Anna Swir (1909 – 1984) Our Two Silences

Silence

flows into me and out of me

washing my past away

I am pure already, waiting for you. Bring me

your silence

They will doze off

nestled in each other’s arms

our two silences

Kobayashi Issa (1763 – 1828) – Haiku

The distant mountains

are reflected in the eye

of the Dragonfly

Background:

William Stafford

Stafford was born in Kansas, the heartland, where some think nothing is worth seeing. Not so, for Stafford. He lived through the Great Depression and was an early activist for Civil Rights. He was forty-six before his first book of poetry appeared. On the subject of writers, Stafford said, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he hadn’t started to say them.”

Anna Swir

She was born in Warsaw, Poland. At university, she studied medieval Polish literature. She began publishing poetry in the 1930s. During WWII, she served as a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. At one point she was within an hour of being executed, but her life was spared.

Kobayashi Issa

Issa’s poetry is replete with deep warmth and compassion for the smallest living beings, on to the world of all beings. Some have called him “a Walt Whitman in miniature.” Perhaps the great sorrows of his life from early youth to the time of his death caused him to look so closely. His mother died when he was three. There was trouble with his father’s second wife and their son. To try to resolve this, the father sent Issa, at fourteen, to be an apprentice in Edo (Tokyo). In Issa’s own marriage, several of his children died extremely young, and afterwards he lost his wife as well. These misfortunes left open wounds and although deeply painful, Issa saw magical beauty everywhere.

Exploration 1: Who is the mindful one in Stafford’s poem? What do his senses bring to him?

Exploration 2: Anna Swir’s poem suggests meaning in silence. What might that meaning be, and how might it be created?

Exploration 3: What might one see in the Dragonfly’s eye? Why is the “D” in Dragonfly capitalized?