Reflections of a Man's Heart

Thanks for your lovely words!

Keep your head cool, and your heart warm, so that good things continue happening . . .

^^

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

And he is your board and your fireside.

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."

And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed

 

 

- Gibran Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

More fragrant

because of the one

who saw and picked them,

these flowers,

precious, transient

- Izumi Shikibu

What a little girl had on her mind was:

Why do the shoulders of other men's wives

give off so strong a smell of magnolia;

or like gardenias?

What is it,

that faint veil of mist,

over the shoulders of other men's wives?

She wanted to have one,

that wonderful thing

even the prettiest virgin cannot have.

The little girl grew up.

She became a wife and then a mother.

One day she suddenly realized;

the tenderness

that gathers over the shoulders of wives,

is only fatigue

from loving others day after day.

- Ibaragi Noriko

God certainly wasn't

sun stubbornly continued rising

i stubbornly continued loving

but God was there one day

i took a look in myself

from around what time?

was it from the time i was a fish?

in my spirit there was a deep wound

no sound no color without interval:heat

the flowing blood resembled God

from the wound i

felt everything then

stubbornly  i did

those are my watery eyes thirsty lips

a dog's sense of smell deer's sense of hearing

that was my sadness

sadness is a mollusk's two antennae

when the world meaninglessly flowed from the wound

i in the middle of trembling

there is a world sky:blue

blue sky pierced into wound

God stubbornly continued to be absent

i stubbornly continued loving

- Yoshihara Sachiko

I.

The sky's blue deepens to meet

the darkness of trees.

In the window

an old woman's face

looks at me, yellow in the yellow light.

I can see the grain, the winnowing, the chaff

cupped in her hands -

an indiscriminate harvest,

years of shadows settling in like birds.

2.

What is it to look at your hands

and see the veins, at last, completely emerge?

To feel your body's surface erode?

In the quiet nights, all the stark lace-work

starts to come undone,

the fine nerve-net releases its music

gently into the dark.

3.

I asked my grandmother about this

but she told me lies,

stories she'd heard from her own grandmother,

re-worked.

I asked my grandmother again

and she called me by her dead sister's name -

May, she murmured, May.

- Jane Hirshfield, Of Gravity & Angels.

I am sick today,

sick in my body,

eyes wide open, silent,

I lie on the bed of childbirth.

Why do I,

so used to the nearness of death,

to pain and blood and screaming,

now uncontrollably tremble with dread?

A nice young doctor tried to comfort me,

and talked about the joy of giving birth.

Since I know better than he about the matter,

what good purpose can his prattle server?

Knowledge is not reality.

Experience belongs to the past.

Let those who lack immediacy be silent.

Let observers be content to observe.

I am alone,

totally, utterly, entirely on my own,

gnawing my lips, holding my body rigid,

waiting on inexorable fate.

There is only one truth.

I shall give birth to a child,

truth driving outward from my inwardness.

Neither good nor bad; real, no sham about it.

With the first labor pains,

suddenly the sun goes pale.

The indifferent world goes strangely calm.

I am alone.

It is alone I am.

- Yosano Akiko

There is that cafe

- a couple of inmigrants run it.

They always get my command wrong.

And, do you know?

They look poor.

I always look at the woman's womb,

- she is pregnant

before I accept whatever they happen to bring me.

It is only then that I awake

to the simplest truth:

the only sin is detachment,

all others stemming from it.

And how the heart falters.

How do I wonder

why we always fail

in so many ways.

Nor do we know

what is needed to be necessary.

All the same

we turn the light off at night.

And how it all

falls upon my heart.

What I want of that moment

is simple.

In this world,

the only sin is detachment.

And how the heart falters,

missing you.

- Pet

Do you remember,

back then?

The second day you stayed at home

we spent all morning tidying up - together

We might be a bit crazy

- or not

Whatever, it was an old trick -

good old trick.

Because most things end up

exactly the way they begin.

Even love,

even this love

For love is, all too often,

as simple as taking care of broken windows.

For love is, all too often,

just work.

- Pet

A single ray in the dawn,

The bliss of our love

Is incomprehensible.

No sun shines there, no

Moon, no stars, no lightning flash,

Not even lamplight.

All things are incandescent

With love which lights up all the world.

- Marichiko

Human action is judgment

- or so I am told.

All the same is this longing fueled

by the scent of jasmin at dusk.

Getting to know this waiting as love, 

this love as salt.

- Pet