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Secular or Eclectic
Buddhist
Contemporary

About Jane Hirshfield

Timeline (Contemporary)

Jane Hirshfield, Jane Hirshfield poetry, Secular or Eclectic, Secular or Eclectic poetry,  poetry, [TRADITION SUB2] poetry, Buddhist poetry

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Original Language
English

The Heart's Counting Knows Only One

Themes
  Lover and Beloved
  Mountain
  Silence
 
 

 

Recommended Books

After: Poems, by Jane Hirshfield
Each Happiness Ringed by Lions, by Jane Hirshfield
Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems, by Jane Hirshfield
The Lives of the Heart: Poems, by Jane Hirshfield
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield

More >>

In Sung China,
two monks friends for sixty years
watched the geese pass.
Where are they going?
one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship
in the koan-books of insight.
No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,
standing, perplexed by sadness,
goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,
but not yet.

As the barely audible
geese are not yet swallowed;
as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

 

 

-- from The Lives of the Heart: Poems, by Jane Hirshfield

Amazon.com

 

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Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2008 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.