The One World We All Belong To
This week's collection of poems on the theme of morning.
Dear Friends,
The bright flash of summer is coming to an end. It is a season we wish to soak the juices from as much as we can, like a ripe peach in the palm of our hand. In the same length of time it takes for a fruit to bruise, summer passes. We try our best to hold onto its light, to wrap ourselves in its warmth, to stop the fleeting of time before it slips between our fingers.
I always catch myself trying to make up for the moments of light I have lost as September arrives, wishing I had gotten out of bed an hour earlier when the water on the lake is still as held breath. There are few things that compare to the peace of early morning — standing alone in the golden silence of first light listening to the songs of birds.
This week’s collection of poetry is on the theme of morning with an invitation to wake up early, get outside, and embrace what the waking world has to offer in the last days of summer light. I’ve included a writing prompt below for inspiration, enjoy!
POEM OF THE ONE WORLD
By Mary Oliver
This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water
and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to
where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else
which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.
THE MORNING IS FULL
By Pablo Neruda
The morning is full of storm
in the heart of summer.
The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye,
the wind, traveling, waving them in its hands.
The numberless heart of the wind
beating above our loving silence.
Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees
like a language full of wars and songs.
Wind that bears off the dead leaves with a quick raid
and deflects the pulsing arrows of the birds.
Wind that topples her in a wave without spray
and substance without weight, and leaning fires.
Her mass of kisses breaks and sinks,
assailed in the door of the summer's wind.HAIKU
By Octavio Paz / Translated by Muriel Rukeyser
The hand of day opens
Three clouds
Becoming a few words 
WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING
By David Whyte
In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
that closes
the moment
you begin your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To become human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?
What shape waits
in the seed of you
to grow and spread
its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open,
lovely and inviting
white page
on the waiting desk?
DEW LIGHT
by W.S Merwin
Now in the blessed days of more or less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
Peace