not one is not held

A green heart for you !! have a sweet and nice weekend.

The Lives of the Heart

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible, are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit.
Rise up as cities as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy’s lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate – violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

–Jane Hirshfield

intensity of the light

image credits:

Matthew Fang via Compfight

sunset by Vala Run

Jane Hirshfield‘s poem, The Lives of the Heart, is from the book of the same name, published in 1997 by HarperPerennial. I’m re-reading it.

2 thoughts on “not one is not held

  1. Have you read much Hirshfield, George? I think she’d be right up your alley, writing, as she does, out of her zen training. She co-translated and brought Japanese tanka to greater prominence in the English-speaking world.

    I’m learning another of her poems (what else to do with time spent alone in a car but recite lines?… or listen to German podcasts, but that’s another topic entirely :D) and just “scored” her book of essays on “poetic mind” at the library book sale.

    You’ll be seeing more of her words here 🙂

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