Be yourself
Two poems, five hundred years apart, ending with the observation that in the end, all we can really affect is ourselves.
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road,
and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank,
or resting?
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no towrope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank,
no ford!
And there is no body, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make
the soul less thirsty?
In that great absence, you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away
all thoughts of imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
--Kabir/Robert Bly
The earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents--
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, ambitions, caresses,
Like everybody had once--
All the bright neige d'antan people,
"Blithe Helen, white Iope,
and the rest,"
All the uneasy, remembered dead.
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once
west through deserts--
The precious metal
on our mingled hair,
The frankincense
of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate,
invincible kisses--
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany
of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.
--Kenneth Rexroth