Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again Book

Ten candles burning in the darkness - ten poems that spread a little hope for our eyes to see better, for our heart to find the love resonating rhythm, for our mind to penetrate deeper obscure meanings, and for our spirit to breathe and survive.

I followed Rilke's pathway towards the acceptance of change, and I've seen the ugliness of fear dissipating when we let our senses feel the vibration of beauty given by the next moment. I read Whyte's poem, and I let my thoughts run towards the ones who I love embracing them with the invisible arms of my heart. At Bass' 'Gate 22', I stopped wishing for the light of the candle that I was holding tightly hoping that it will never fade, never die.

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS, PART TWO, XII by Rainer Maria Rilke
"Want the change. Be inspired by the flam
Where everything shines as it
disappears
The artist, when sketching, loves
nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain
Flow into the knowledge that what
you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and,
with ending, begins. "
............

What to Remember When Waking --by David Whyte
":.......
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?"

Gate 22 by Ellen Bass

"At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carryons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching-
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after-if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now-you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up."