What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.
On the linen wrappings of certain mummified remains
found near the Etrurian coast are invaluable writings
that await translation.

Quem colorem habet sapientia?

Ordinary men fulfill themselves
in the company of their fellows.

I am told of a peasant who, one morning when mists
lay across his field,
picked up a feather that had dropped from
the great horse, Pegasus; who placed the feather
in his cap and abandoned the world
for a dream.

I have heard that when the wild geese move in their season
a strange tide is raised; and long after they have gone
the fowl of the barnyard leap up frantically into the air
with shrill, desperate cries—their nut-like heads
stuffed and disordered with vestigial recollections
urging them from domestic felicity toward unremembered
chasms in the presence of another, bolder skein.

Nothing existed before me; nothing will exist after me.

Myth, art, and dreams are but emanations
from ancestral spheres.

Karma, which is the wheel of fate,
is indestructible. A new world shall be born
that it may continue to fulfill its endless process.

We are to regard the world as an empty trifle,
so said Buddha; then alone
will it yield happiness, enabling us to live blissfully
throughout life’s vicissitudes.

Let us become Yasoda, the soul of woman, which calls out
to Lord Krishna in the fullness of her love, and sees
in him the universe.

As thou to me,
so I to thee.
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What Sparks Poetry:
Dong Li on Evan S. Carroll's Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

"Vestigial shards of old legend and lore dart in and out of vertiginous fragments of human folly and futility, now like lightning on a clear day, now like fireflies on a talkative night. The 'I' slyly travails through historical significance and triviality until the tribulations of fear, faith, and ferocity surface in a dizzying dream state, hauling history into the prophetic present, where associative meanings are distilled into a crude and cruel illumination."
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Jane Hirshfield Answers the Orion Questionnaire

"I’m still amazed to have joined the pandemic sourdough bakers. Whole-wheat boules with those lovely white ring lines on them, focaccia topped with rosemary and feta, a rye bread with wild fennel seed as well as caraway. A person can learn to do this! With flour, water, salt, heat, time, and everyone who’s done it before you, and with the farmers, millers, truckers, shopkeepers, soil and air microbes lending a hand."

via ORION
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