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My Delight and Thy Delight

My delight and thy delight
Walking, like two angels white,
In the gardens of the night:

My desire and thy desire
Twining to a tongue of fire,
Leaping live, and laughing higher:

Thro’ the everlasting strife
In the mystery of life.

Love, from whom the world begun,
Hath the secret of the sun.

Love can tell, and love alone,
Whence the million stars were strewn,
Why each atom knows its own,
How, in spite of woe and death,
Gay is life, and sweet is breath:

This he taught us, this we knew,
Happy in his science true,
Hand in hand as we stood
‘Neath the shadows of the wood,
Heart to heart as we lay
In the dawning of the day.

Robert Bridges

A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand becoming, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean.

It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature.

It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night, become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language.

Haiku: Eastern Culture, 1949, Volume One

But the truth, the first truth,
probably,
is that we are all connected,
watching one another.

Even the trees.

Arthur Miller, Timebends

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Lin Yutang

A Man’s Nature

A man needs one minute
to love a woman
and centuries to forget her

…Nizar Qabbani

Translated by L. Jayyusi and C. Middleton

In The Summer

In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you.
Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.

…Nizar Qabbani

Translated by B. Frangieh And C. Brown

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast -
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

Ezra Pound

The temple bell stops.
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Matsuo Basho

Its house abandoned,
the garden has become home
to butterflies.

Iio Sogi (1421-1502)

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.
And he answered saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

Kahlil Gibran,

an extract from a lovely haiku by P Noble

freshly cut oranges
revive memories
too deep for sharing

orion’s arm
reaches over the horizon
tossing stars