Status Updates From The Shambhala Anthology of ...

Blue is Greece where fishermen tame their boats,
where I float naked in the color of truth, the sea

humming in my ears, lulling me with ultramarines
like a baby kicking in amniotic seas, like god

whose throne is this transparent blue bowl
this star-sapphire studded cradle of waves

She must have blue skin and eyes, lapis lazuli
looped in strands and strands around her rounded belly


—from Blue, Aliki Barnstone

Her hair is the white froth of rice rising up kettlesides, her mind also.
....
We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
But at times..we experience something close.
As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden.
And in the silence surrounding what happened to us

it is the bell to awaken God that we’ve heard ringing.

—Carolyn Forché, from “The Garden Shukkei-en”

The yew tree points up. It has a gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
.
.
—Sylvia Plath, from The Moon and the Yew Tree, 22 October 1961

My sister,
you come like a spring wind over our valleys . . .
Violets in shadow have the scent of fulfillment.
I want to take you to the loveliest place in the forest:
There we’ll confess to each other how we saw God.
.
.
.
Vernal Mystery, Edith Södergran, (1892-1923), Finnish, wrote in Swedish. (Translated by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone.)

They say that plants don’t talk, nor do brooks or birds,
nor the wave with its chatter, nor stars with their shine.
They say it but it’s not true, for whenever I walk by
they whisper and yell about me
“There goes that crazy woman dreaming
of life’s endless spring and of fields
and soon, very soon, her hair will be gray.
She sees the shaking, terrified frost cover the meadow.”
.
.
(Continued in comment)

Is it the night of power
Or only your hair?
Is it dawn
Or your face?

In the songbook of beauty
Is it a deathless first line
Or only a fragment
Copied from your inky eyebrow?
.
Is it musk of a Chinese deer
Or scent of delicate rosewater?
The rose breathing in the wind
Or your perfume?
.
Everyone faces a mosque of adobe & mud
When they pray
The mosque of Hayati’s soul
Turns to your face
.
Bibi Hayati d.1853 Persian

For the Courtesan Ch'ing Lin

On your slender body
Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime
Like those of a celestial companion
Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven.
One smile from you when we meet,
And I become speechless and forget every word...
I can visualize you all alone,
A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.
.
.
--Wu Zao (Wu Tsao)
translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung

To Hope

A green beguilement in our natural life,
mad hope and frenzy wrapped about with gold,
a dream by those awake, yet thinly cold
like dreams and treasures rife, with illusions.
Soul of the world, exuberant old age,
decrepit greenness of pure fantasy,
the now for which the happy ones rampage,
the future where the miserable would be.
.
.
continued in comment

The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again.

And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.

Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.

My teacher told me one thing,
Live in the soul.

When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.
.
.
.
—Lal Ded, 14th century (?), Kashmir
translated by Coleman Barks

You are the luminous earth
through whom the Word breathed forth...
.
.
.
from Antiphon of the Gem Who Is Mary by Hildegard of Bingen

I’ll never forget the sunset at Brook Pavilion—
drunk with beauty, we lost our way.
When the ecstasy faded, we turned our boat home,
but it was late and we strayed into a place deep with lotus flowers
and rowed hard, so hard
the whole shore erupted with herons and gulls.
.
.
.
—To the Tune of “Dream Song,” Li Qingzhao (Li Ch’ing-Chao) (1084-ca. 1151)

Orange leaves are gone,
ripped away by cold night
and winter rain.
If only yesterday we’d gone
to see the mountains!
.
.
.
—Izumi Shikibu (Lady Izumi) ca. 974-1034

Someone else
looked at the sky
with the same rapture
when the moon
crossed the dawn.
.
.
.
—Izumi Shikibu (Lady Izumi) ca. 974-1034

Mary Magdalene

Lord, this woman...perceives the God in you,
...crying she brings myrrh before your tomb.
“O what a night what a night I’ve had!
Extravagant frenzy in a moonless gloom,
craving the body.
Accept this spring of tears...
I will kiss your feet, wash them,
dry them with the hair of my head, those feet whose steps
Eve heard at dusk
in Paradise and hid in terror....
.
.
—A hymn by Kassia, c. 840

All night I could not sleep
because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “yes.”

—Zi Ye (Tzu Yeh)
6th-3rd centuries BCE (?)
translated by Arthur Waley

Supreme Sight on the Black Earth

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is

the one you love. And easily proved.
Didn’t Helen, who far surpassed all
mortals in beauty, desert the best
of men, her king,

and sail off to Troy and forget
her daughter and her dear parents? Merely
Aphrodite’s gaze made her readily bend

(cont. in comment)

Oh, if you were my brother
who sucked my mother’s breasts!

When I find you in the streets
or country, unshamed

I will kiss you
and no one will despise me.

I’ll take you to my mother’s home
and into her room

where she conceived me
and there you’ll instruct me.

I’ll give you spiced wine to drink,
the juice of my pomegranates.
.
.
.
from the Song of Songs,
Anonymous Jew,
10th-3rd centuries BCE