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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

Metempsychosis

Themes
  Bower
  Garden
  Heart
  Honey
  Sound

 

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 >>

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off‹
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

 

 

-- from Given Sugar, Given Salt: 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.