namesof QUOTES

1 " Many who have learned
from Hesiod the countless names
of gods and monsters
never understand
that night and day are one "

― Heraclitus , Fragments

2 " NAMING THE EARTH
(a poem of light for national poetry day)

And the world will be born again
in circles of steaming breath
and beams of light
as each one of us directs
our inner eye
upon its name.

Hear the cry of wings,
the sigh of leaves and grass,
smell the new sweet mist rising
as the pathway is cleared at last.

Stones stand ready -
they have known
since ages and ages ago
that they were not alone.

Water carries the planet's energy
into skies and down
to earth and bones.

The cold parts steadily
as we come together,
bodies and hearts warm,
hands tingling.
We are silent
but our eyes are singing.

We look, we feel, we know,
we trust each other's souls,
we have no need to speak.
Not now, but later,
when the time is right,
the name will ring
within the iron core
of each other's listening -
and the very earth's being.

Every creature, every plant,
will hear it calling,
tolling like a bell -
a sound we've always felt
but never dared to hope
to hear reverberating -
true at last, at every level
of existence.

The poets come together
to open the intimate centre.
Believe
in life and air -
breathe the light itself,
for these are the energies
and rhythms that we need
to see, to touch, to reach,
to identify, to say, the NAME.

Colours on your skin
fuse and dissolve -
leave the river clean
for pure space and time
to enter and flow in.

We all become one fluid stream
of stillness and motion,
of flaring thought
pulses discovering
weird pools and twists within
where darkness hides
from the flames in our eyes
but will not snare us.

We probe deeper still,
journeying towards a unity
which will be more raw
and yet also more formed
than anything written
or spoken before.

Our fragile bodies
fall away -
and the trees,
and the roots of trees,
guide us -
lead us away
from the faces we remember
seeing each day in the mirror -

into an ocean
of dreams
seething with warmth,
love,
where the beginning
is real,
ripe, evolving.

And the world is born again
in circles of steaming breath
and beams of light.

An ache -
a signal -
a trembling moment -
and the time is right
to say the name.

We sing as one whole
voice of the universal -
all the words, the names
of every tiny thirsting thing,
and they ring out together
as one sound,
one energy, one sense,
one vibration, one breath.

And the world listens,
beats, shines, glows -
IS -
Exists! "

― Jay Woodman

3 " And now it is said of me
That my love is nothing because I have borne no children,
Or because I have fathered none;
That I twisted the twig in my hands
And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed;
That I lay across the fire,
And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain.

But I have turned away, and drawn myself
Upright to walk along the room alone.
Across the dark the spines of cactus plants
Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure,
Indifferent to the words the children chalk
Against my house and down the garden walls.
They cannot tear the garden out of me,
Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff,
A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars,
smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea
Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more,
Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again.

I keep the house and say no words, the evening
Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees.
I light the fire and see the blossom dance
On air alone; I will not douse that flame,
That searing flower; I will burn in it.
I will not banish love to empty rain.

For I know that I am asked to hate myself
For their sweet sake
Who sow the world with child.
I am given to burn on the dark fire they make
With their sly voices.

But I have burned already down to bone.
There is a fire that burns beyond the names
Of sludge and filth of which this world is made.
Agony sears the dark flesh of the body,
And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise
Above the earth, above the sacrifice;
Until my soul flares outward like a blue
Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air:
Free of the body’s work of twisted iron. "

― James Wright