Mitch Wiley

“Ambergris"

This body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Proclaims itself the very whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution's sweet increase.
Exquisite fern of death--in nature, ambergris.

Meanwhile, thinking of love, I have been dressed
For such destruction. Though it surely break,
Come pluck the deep wild kernel of my breast,
That wafer of devotion, and partake
Of its compacted sweetness, till it bring
The sould to rise upon its fleshly wing.

If gentle heart be scorned, in scorn of it
I shall immerse it in such bitterness,
Bather every pulse in such an acid wit,
That from my mammoth, cold, and featureless
Event of age, my enemied will flee,
Whereas my friends will stay and pillage me.
Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2000)”
― Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems

“Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained…

I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by…

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.”
― Edwin Muir

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?"
A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“The light that shines farthest shines brightest nearest home.”
― C.T. Studd