In Praise of Hands by Stuart Kestenbaum

Mary

Megan

It's not just the people
who live in the city

who've lost the thread
that ties them to the woven

world of stones and earth,
fields alive with pollen and wings.

Who among us understands
how oceans rise and fall,

currents swirling around the planet
with messages in bottles

floating on the water.
When the tide is out

we can go to the shore
dig clay with our bare hands

and make something beautiful from it,
a vessel with thin walls

that holds a canyon.
In both hands, like an offering,

we can hold the memory
of eroded stones and earth,

eons contained in this empty bowl.
We can fill it with water

that reflects the sky that has
witnessed everything since

time began, we can drink and be blessed,
clouds gathering over us.

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

Will

Megan

There is a place where the sidewalk ends

And before the street begins,

And there the grass grows soft and white,

And there the sun burns crimson bright,

And there the moon-bird rests from his flight

To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black

And the dark street winds and bends.

Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow

We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And watch where the chalk-white arrows go

To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,

For the children, they mark, and the children, they know

The place where the sidewalk ends.

Piecemeal by Sarah Rice

Mary

Megan

These things I must steel myself against

Old men packing books into boxes
The empty seat between people at the movies
The smell of armpits on cardigans
Ironing on the dining table with a towel underneath
Friends who no longer talk to each other
Bejewelled butterflies or fairies
And cards with ‘reach for the stars’
Square brittle toe nails
And plastic bags filled with plastic bags
A choc chip muffin to celebrate something
And unplanted punnets with the white roots
straggling from beneath the blue plastic
Board games with missing pieces
And everything with pieces missing
And everything that is in pieces
And everything that is missing

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

Megan

Mary

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Sunset by Rainier Maria Rilke

Megan

Mary

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors

which it passes to a row of ancient trees.

You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you

one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,

not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,

not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing

that turns to a star each night and climbs--

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)

your own life, timid and standing high and growing,

so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Evergreen by David Malouf

Megan

Mary


At twenty an admirer
of crocus and hyacinth, all
those dawn stars like snowflakes
lighting the grass,
I expected like them
to burn out fast, touch paper
flaring, gone
in a quick blast before thirty.
How else should one live?

And here I am a decade
on from that early death.
Having endured
thirty and the years
beyond, it's the stolid ones, the inchling
head - in - clouds slow - growers
I envy -  turning stars
in their branches, holding
fast to the earth.

It's trees I look for nowadays,
year after year
adding their rings, recording
this month's frost, that season's
burning,  the arrival
and departure of leaves, birds,
mice, barefoot invaders,
and applecore wars
in the kingdom of twigs.

I've discovered an old man's folly,
I'm planting giants :  wych elm,
chestnut, larch, a seed
cast into the next
  long  - shadowed century.
I doze in the
shade of a bunyah pine, its roots
deep in the 1880s,
bubbling with doves.

In its wind - rocked boughs the heavy
green Pacific drowses
and grandfather sets sail
to find us; the tree is
dreaming our lives.
Its dust - thick shadow reaches
the road, and I
swing high on a tide of voices.
Green, green, evergreen.

Who Are My People? by Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni

Mary

Megan

Who Are My People?

My people? Who are they?

I went into the church where the congregation

Worshipped my God. Were they my people?

I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.

My people! Where are they?

I went into the land where I was born,

Where men spoke my language...

I was a stranger there.

"My people," my soul cried. "Who are my people?"

Last night in the rain I met an old man

Who spoke a language I do not speak,

Which marked him as one who does not know my God.

With apologetic smile he offered me

The shelter of his patched umbrella.

I met his eyes... And then I knew...