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By: Judyth Hill We Have Not Come Here to Take Prisoners by Hafiz We Have Not Come here To Take Prisoners
You’re probably aware of the advantages of practising mindfulness meditation on a daily basis, especially if you are a member of MindOwl’s online community. However, without a more specific focus when we first begin practicing, it can be difficult to keep your mind on the present moment. This is where tools like mindfulness poetry can come into play. You are not required to memorise anything like a mantra, instead, simply read meditative poems like the ones in this post and use them as prompts to direct your thoughts. Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see; Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be. By: Max Ehrmann Embracing Formal Practice: Tasting Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn Embracing Formal Practice: Tasting Mindfulness Christina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She composed her first poem while still a very young girl; she dictated it to her mother. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ It has been almost a mantra among women poets: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser put those words in the mouth of the artist Käthe Kollwitz in one of her most famous poems, and perhaps the world has in fact split open since then, as her poetic daughters (and some sons too) have endeavored to tell the truth about all our lives. Born in New York City in 1913, Rukeyser died in the same city in 1980, after a lifetime of poetry and prose-writing ranging over myth, science, history, politics, and the most intimate of lyric subjects, and a life of political activism spanning decades and continents. Her book The Life of Poetry has become a classic. Her always passionate Collected Poems, long out of print, was reissued, in a version edited with notes by Anne Herzog and Janet Kaufman, by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005, and New Directions will reissue her 1949 Elegies this fall. As poetry in America begins to turn away from its fear of ardor, Rukeyser is more relevant than ever. This essay is adapted from a talk at the Rukeyser Colloquium, given to celebrate her centennial, at Eastern Michigan University in March 2013.
Responses to the Catch Your Breath exhibition
The poem can be heard at https://www.lyrikline.org/de/gedichte/todesfuge-66#.WmoOxk3cvX4 and on the CD ‘Ich hörte sagen’ (note 13). but what of that girl of nineteen, who had always jumped through her skin at the sight of even one palmetto bug……what made her able to crawl on her belly,unthinking….. through the dusts of unknown dirt….eating the dark of nests and dens,.... willing to inhale webs Each member of the Breathe Easy group has a chronic breathing difficulty: some have struggled to breathe for 65 years having had childhood tuberculosis (TB), some have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), others are living with pulmonary fibrosis or the impact of lung cancer. Although raucous over lunch, the BE group members have encountered much stigma and silencing in response to their conditions. Like many people who experience breathlessness, they have quietly made their conditions discreet and invisible. Breathing difficulties are often judged or misunderstood in wider society: a waitress at the pub responded to a coughing fit from one BE member by saying ‘don’t worry, a few germs never hurt’. This was well-meaning but missed the point of what it is to live with breathing difficulties, and the attendant terror of cold germs getting into the lungs. Jill Gladstone later wrote in response to this:
Only a Borgesian library, commensurate with all existence, could complete this listing. It does though seem fitting to close with a few poems that point toward what at times might be called grace, awakening, or realization, and at other times escapes any description beyond Rilke’s: “Perhaps we are only here to say ‘house, bridge, fountain, gate.’”
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Letter of 19 February 1818 to J. H. Reynolds, in The Letters of John Keats, 1814– 1821, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
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