My Courageous Life
My courageous life
has gone ahead
and is looking back,
calling me on.
My courageous life
has seen everything
I have been
and everything
I have not
and has
forgiven me,
day after day.
My courageous life
still wants
my company:
wants me to
understand
my life as witness
and thus
bequeath me
the way ahead.
My courageous life
has the patience
to keep teaching me,
how to invent
my own
disappearance,
and how
once gone,
to reappear again.
My courageous life
wants to stop
being ahead of me
so that it can lie
down and rest
deep inside the body
it has been
calling on.
My courageous life
wants to be
my foundation,
showing me
day after day
even against my will
how to undo myself,
how to surpass myself,
how to laugh as I go
in the face
of danger,
how to invite
the right kind
of perilous
love,
how to find
a way
to die
of generosity.
– David Whyte –
A new version of “Second Life” in Still Possible: Poems by David Whyte
© Many Rivers Press and David Whyte
From David Whyte’s 10/7/22 Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/PoetDavidWhyte
~~~~~~~~~~~
We Travelers
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessings brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.
– Wendell Berry –
(“Sabbaths 1999 VI”)
Excerpt from Given: New Poems
© 2005 by Wendell Berry
~~~~~~~~~~~
Still Possible
It’s still possible to fully understand
you have always been the place
where the miracle has happened:
that you have been since your birth,
the bread given and the wine lifted,
the change witnessed and the change itself,
that you have secretly been, all along,
a goodness that can continue
to be a goodness to itself.
– David Whyte –
Excerpt from “Still Possible” in Still Possible: Poems by David Whyte
Many Rivers Press Jan 1st 2022
~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo by Shanti Natania Grace: “Light on Keck Archway” © 2022
