Although the wind

(Number 10, Art Print Poster by Mark
Rothko, 1903-1970, American artist)

Poets, especially, know how to point out apparent contradictions that reveal a truth, as did Emily Dickinson when she wrote, “Who never lost, are unprepared / A Coronet to find.”

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight
also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

~ Izumi Shikibu (circa 974-1034), Japanese poet

In Silence

(Untitled, 1969 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, American
artist)

“Contemplation is related to art, to worship, to charity: all these reach out by intuition and self-dedication into the realms that transcend the material conduct of everyday life. Or rather, in the midst of ordinary life itself they seek and find a new and transcendent meaning. And by this meaning, they transfigure the whole of life.”

~ Thomas Merton (1915-1968), American Trappist monk, poet, and writer of many books and essays, from Art and Spirituality

IN SILENCE

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them
When all their silence
Is on fire?”

~ Thomas Merton

The Sick Rose

(Untitled, 1970 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, American
artist)

Unfortunately, even the most passionate romance can turn.

THE SICK ROSE

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

~ William Blake, 1757-1827, English poet, painter, engraver, and mystic visionary

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

(Red on Maroon, Mural Section 4, 1959 by Mark
Rothko, 1903-1970, American artist)

The lines below, from a well-known Negro Spiritual, capture the deepest cruelty of slavery in America. The singer cries out in mournful agony about life as an object, an alien, denied any home anywhere.

The metaphor of a fatherless child would not carry the same meaning. Mothers and fathers give us different gifts.

SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE A MOTHERLESS CHILD

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home,
True believer,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home.

Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone,
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone,
Way up in the heav’nly land,
Way up in the heav’nly land,
True believer,
Way up in the heav’nly land,
Way up in the heav’nly land.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A long ways from home,
True believer,
There’s praying everywhere,
There’s praying everywhere.

~ American, traditional

To listen to a performance by the great Marian Anderson, go to this link (you may have to cut and paste):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbAQGV1nUd8

Ten Thousand Flowers

(Untitled, 1969 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970,
American painter)

TEN THOUSAND FLOWERS

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

~ Wu-men (1183-1260), Chinese poet

The Times Are Nightfall

(Red, Orange, Tan and Purple, 1954 by Mark
Rothko, 1903-1970, American painter)

The poet begins with winter as a metaphor for the bleak and dark and cold of despair, but then reminds us of the powerful choice within us, to use our free will.

THE TIMES ARE NIGHTFALL

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one —
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

Lessons from a Painting by Rothko

(Untitled, 1960 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970,
American painter)

Mark Rothko is best known for his abstract paintings of horizontal bands of color stacked vertically up a rectangular canvas. “Often the divisions and intervals between them suggest a horizon or a cloud-bank, thus indirectly locating the image in the domain of landscape,” wrote the art critic Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New.

“This format enabled him to eliminate nearly everything from his work except the spatial suggestions and emotive power of his color, and the breathing intensity of the surfaces, which he built up in the most concentrated way, staining the canvas like watercolor paper and then scumbling it with repeated skins of overpainting, so that . . . one seems to be peering into the depths of mist and water, lit from within.”

The poet was inspired to follow the artist’s technique of repeated overpainting and wrote her poem as a pantoum, or pantum — a verse form composed of quatrains with internal rhyming and the repetition of lines according to an established pattern.

LESSONS FROM A PAINTING BY ROTHKO

How would you paint a poem?
Prepare the canvas carefully
With tiers of misty rectangles
Stacked secrets waiting to be told.

Prepare the canvas carefully
With shallow pools of color
Stacked secrets waiting to be told
Messages from some unknown place.

With shallow pools of color
Thin layers of gauze float over the canvas
Messages from some unknown place
Where soft shapes expand above a glow.

Thin layers of gauze float over the canvas
With tiers of misty rectangles
Where soft shapes expand above a glow.
How would you paint a poem?

~ Bobbi Katz, born 1933, American poet

Morning

(No.2 by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, American painter)

The day breaks quietly.

Morning — cutting firewood, filling my jug
with pure water, gathering wild grasses,
while a cool Autumn rain gently falls.

~ Ryokan (1758-1831), Japanese poet, hermit, and Buddhist monk

Rapids

(Triptych by Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, American painter)

Through the leaves — a glimpse of eternity.

RAPIDS

Fall’s leaves are redder than
spring’s flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.

~ A. R. Ammons (1926-2001), American poet