What We Expect from Ourselves

Here's another small poem from Heaven of Small Moments, this time an ecstatic love poem, newly revised.

What should we expect from ourselves? The mundane, the ordinary, or a wildness and intensity that heightens everything we see and feel? The ecstatic poet Mirabai writes in one of her poems about Krishna: "His seven notes play over and over,/and not even he can stop them." And Rumi writes in Coleman Barks' translation, "What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest."

BLACK CARNATIONS

There's someone inside us
who doesn't believe in real time,
and doesn't want it. He knows
a love that is dark
and wild, and his hand

reaches instinctively for it.
A thirsty man claims water;
the cricket, feeling the cold
that is coming,
sings of the frost.

And Rumi saw
through the eyes of his friend
even after his friend was gone.
Why should we expect
anything less from ourselves?

(Copyright Allan Cooper 1998, 2008)

A Spring Poem

I wrote this small poem in 1993. It was later published in Heaven of Small Moments (Broken Jaw Press, 1998). I was influenced by the old Chinese poets, James Wright and Kabir when I wrote this poem.

I usually have a long trek across the hills in early spring to see what's happening in the natural world. The hummingbirds are just back, and they're busy in the river willows and at the feeder. A rose-breasted grosbeak visited us for a whole afternoon. And the centre of gold that I write about in the poem seems to be getting stronger every day.

WALKING IN THE HILLS IN EARLY SPRING

Somehow the day begins
unfettered.
A few little willow leaves
open.
Dry leaves of maples
that fell last autumn
give off their radiance.
This is the centre of gold I wanted.
All afternoon
I walk alone across the hills, content,
accompanied
only by my shadow.

(Copyright Allan Cooper 1998, 2008)