1 
 
 
Readings for Shorelines: a mini-anthology  
compiled by Emily Archer 
 
These poems have been partners for many reflective conversations, but they 
represent only a tiny fraction of short texts that could be resonant for your hospice 
community.  When you think “text” also think visual art, short film, song lyrics, 
one-page stories, anything that can be shared and discussed by your group in an 
hour.  If you find a piece that your group has found meaningful, please pass it 
along, and we’ll gladly add it to the common wealth for reflection.  Email me: 
[email protected] 
Please note: This material is to be used for therapeutic and/or educational purposes only.  It is 
not intended for sale or wider distribution. © in name of poet/author/artist/filmmaker. 
 
Table of contents 
W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts…………………………………  3 
    Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus ……………… 4 
 
Ellen Bass, If you Knew………………………………………………… 5 
 
Wendell Berry, I go among trees……………………………………… 6 
 
Wendell Berry, I go by a field………………………………………….. 7 
 
Wendell Berry, The Sycamore …………………………………………8 
 
Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats………………………………………9 
 
Robert Cording, Old Houses……………………………………………10 
 
Patricia Fargnoli, The Undeniable Pressure of Existence…………..11 
 
Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays………………………………12 
 
Jane Hirshfield, For What Binds Us……………………………………13 
 

2 
 
Jane Hirshfield, Today When I Could Do Nothing……………………14 
 
Denise Levertov, Death Psalm: O Lord of Mysteries………………...15 
 
Alison Luterman, Obstacles…………………………………………….17 
 
Czeslaw Milosz, Love……………………………………………………19 
 
Lisel Mueller, An Unanswered Question………………………………20 
 
Lisel Mueller, Monet Refuses the Operation………………………….21 
 
Boris Novak, Decisions………………………………………………….22 
 
Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness………………………………………….23 
 
Naomi Shihab Nye, The Traveling Onion…………………………….24 
 
Naomi Shihab Nye, Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change…….….25 
 
Mary Oliver, The Place I Want to Get Back To………………….…...26 
 
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese………………………………………………..27 
 
Rumi, The Guest House………………………………………………..28 
 
Kay Ryan, Three Poems……………………………………………….29 
 
Pat Schneider, The Patience of Ordinary Things……………………30 
 
William Stafford, The Way It Is………………………………………. .31 
 
William Stafford, You Reading This Be Ready………………………32 
 
A few resources for short texts………………………………………..33 
 
This material is to be used for therapeutic and/or educational purposes only.  It is not intended for sale 
or wider distribution. © in name of poet/author/artist/filmmaker.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

--W. H. Auden

Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus

Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last

to touch someone?

If you were taking tickets, for example,

at the theater, tearing them,

giving back the ragged stubs,

you might take care to touch that palm,

brush your fingertips

along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase

too slowly through the airport, when

the car in front of me doesn't signal,

when the clerk at the pharmacy

won't say Thank you, I don't remember

they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.

They'd just had lunch and the waiter,

a young gay man with plum black eyes,

joked as he served the coffee, kissed

her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.

Then they walked half a block and her aunt

dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume

have to come? How wide does the crack

in heaven have to split?

What would people look like

if we could see them as they are,

soaked in honey, stung and swollen,

reckless, pinned against time?

-- Ellen Bass

I Go Among Trees, From Sabbaths, 1979

I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places

where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,

mute in my consternations,

I hear my song at last,

and I sing it. As we sing

the day turns, the trees move.

-- Wendell Berry

(I go by a field . . .), from Sabbaths, IX.

I go by a field where once

I cultivated a few poor crops.

It is now covered with young trees,

for the forest that belongs here

has come back and reclaimed its own.

And I think of all the effort

I have wasted and all the time,

and of how much joy I took

in that failed work and how much

it taught me. For in so failing

I learned something of my place,

something of myself, and now

I welcome back the trees.

-- Wendell Berry

The Sycamore

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

And is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

--- Wendell Berry

blessing the boats

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

--Lucille Clifton

Old Houses

Year after year after year

I have come to love slowly

how old houses hold themselves—

before November's drizzled rain

or the refreshing light of June—

as if they have all come to agree

that, in time, the days are no longer

a matter of suffering or rejoicing.

I have come to love

how they take on the color of rain or sun

as they go on keeping their vigil

without need of a sign, awaiting nothing

more than the birds that sing from the eaves,

the seizing cold that sounds the rafters.

--Robert Cording

The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

I saw the fox running by the side of the road

past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums

past the Citgo gas station with its line of cars and trucks

and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired

past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,

past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows

and he kept running to where the interstate

crossed the state road and he reached it and he ran on

under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect

rows of split-levels, their identical driveways

their brookless and forestless yards,

and from my moving car, I watched him,

helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond

any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,

far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,

his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,

some possible salvation

in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.

-- Patricia Fargnoli

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

-- Robert Hayden

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

--- Jane Hirshfield

Today, when I could do nothing

Today, when I could do nothing,

I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,

still being delivered

to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,

time,

a garden,

silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked

the morning paper, as if loosened ink

taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —

then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,

crossing a navy cushion,

moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,

it could not have found again its nest.

What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,

even while walking my hand,

which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,

whose ant-heart I could not fathom—

how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,

contribute nothing

beyond staying distant from my own kind,

I did this.

---Jane Hirshfield

Death Psalm: O Lord of Mysteries

She grew old.

She made ready to die.

She gave counsel to women and men, to young girls and

young boys.

She remembered her griefs.

She remembered her happinesses.

She watered the garden.

She accused herself.

She forgave herself.

She learned new fragments of wisdom.

She forgot old fragments of wisdom.

She abandoned certain angers.

She gave away gold and precious stones.

She counted-over her handkerchiefs of fine lawn.

She continued to laugh on some days, to cry on others,

unfolding the design of her identity.

She practiced the songs she knew, her voice

gone out of tune

but the breathing-pattern perfected.

She told her sons and daughters she was ready.

She maintained her readiness.

She grew very old.

She watched the generations increase.

She watched the passing of seasons and years.

She did not die.

She did not die but lies half-speechless, incontinent,

aching in body, wandering in mind

in a hospital room.

A plastic tube, taped to her nose,

disappears into one nostril.

Plastic tubes are attached to veins in her arms.

Her urine runs through a tube into a bottle under the bed.

One her back and ankles are black sores.

The black sores are parts of her that have died.

The beating of her heart is steady.

She is not whole.

She made ready to die, she prayed, she made her peace,

she read daily from the lectionary.

She tended the green garden she had made,

she fought off the destroying ants,

she watered the plants daily

and took note of their blossoming.

She gave sustenance to the needy.

She prepared her life for the hour of death.

But the hour has passed and she has not died.

O Lord of mysteries, how beautiful is sudden death

when the spirit vanishes

boldly and without casting

a single shadowy feather of hesitation

onto the felled body.

O Lord of mysteries, how baffling, how clueless

is laggard death, disregarding

all that is set before it

in the dignity of welcome—

laggard death, that steals

insignificant patches of flesh—

laggard death, that shuffles

past the open gate,

past the open hand,

past the open,

ancient,

courteously waiting life.

---Denise Levertov

Because even the word obstacle is an obstacle

Try to love everything that gets in your way:

the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps

murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane

while you execute thirty-six furious laps,

one for every item on your to-do list.

The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water

like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side,

whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.

Teachers all. Learn to be small

and swim through obstacles like a minnow

without grudges or memory. Dart

toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacle

is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl

idly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:

Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,

in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.

Be glad she’ll have that to look at all her life,

and keep going, keep going. Swim by an uncle

in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew

how to hold his breath underwater,

even though kids aren’t allowed at this hour. Someday,

years from now, this boy

who is kicking and flailing in the exact place

you want to touch and turn

will be a young man, at a wedding on a boat

raising his champagne glass in a toast

when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.

He’ll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,

but he’ll come up like a cork,

alive. So your moment

of impatience must bow in service to a larger story,

because if something is in your way it is

going your way, the way

of all beings; towards darkness, towards light.

--- Alison Luterman

Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself

the way one looks at distant things

for you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things

so that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn't always understand.

-- Czeslaw Milosz

An Unanswered Question

If I had been the lone survivor

of my Tasmanian tribe,

the only person in the world

to speak my language

(as she was),

if I had known and believed that

(for who can believe

in an exhaustible language),

and if I had been shipped

to London, to be exhibited

in a cage (as she was)

to entertain the curious

who go to museums and zoos,

and if among all those people

staring and pointing and laughing

and making their meaningless sounds

there had been one thoughtful face,

a woman’s, say, sympathetic,

who might have instinctively understood

the one word I could not let die,

the indispensable word

I must pass through the bars

of mutual incomprehension,

what word would it have been?

--Lisel Mueller

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as

angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

---Lisel Mueller

Decisions

Between two words

choose the quieter one.

Between word and silence

choose listening.

Between two books

choose the dustier one.

Between the earth and the sky

choose a bird.

Between two animals

choose the one who needs you more.

Between two children

choose both.

Between the lesser and the bigger evil

choose neither.

Between hope and despair

choose hope:

it will be harder to bear.

--Boris Novak

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

The Traveling Onion

“It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Egypt it was an object of

worship —why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and

on to Italy, thence into all of Europe.” — Better Living Cookbook

When I think how far the onion has traveled

just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise

all small forgotten miracles,

crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,

pearly layers in smooth agreement,

the way the knife enters onion

and onion falls apart on the chopping block,

a history revealed.

And I would never scold the onion

for causing tears.

It is right that tears fall

for something small and forgotten.

How at meal, we sit to eat,

commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma

but never on the translucence of onion,

now limp, now divided,

or its traditionally honorable career:

For the sake of others,

disappear.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change

is train tracks. She’s sure of it.

The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery

by the side, but not the tracks.

I’ve watched one for three years, she says,

and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track

near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train

is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.

The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street

butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.

The widow in the tilted house

spices her soup with cinnamon.

Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.

The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.

The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound

but when it goes away, shrinking back

from the walls of the brain,

it takes something different with it every time.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

The Place I Want To Get Back To

is where

in the pinewoods

in the moments between

the darkness

and first light

two deer

came walking down the hill

and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,

this one is okay,

let's see who she is

and why she is sitting

on the ground like that,

so quiet, as if

asleep, or in a dream,

but, anyway, harmless;

and so they came

on their slender legs

and gazed upon me

not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look

and look and look

into the faces of the flowers;

and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life

bring to me that could exceed

that brief moment?

For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,

not waiting, exactly, just lingering.

Such gifts, bestowed,

can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this

come to visit. I live in the house

near the corner, which I have named

Gratitude.

---Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

--Mary Oliver

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

-- Rumi

three poems by Kay Ryan

The Best of It

However carved up

or pared down we get,

we keep on making

the best of it as though

it doesn't matter that

our acre's down to

a square foot. As

though our garden

could be one bean

and we'd rejoice if

it flourishes, as

though one bean

could nourish us.

Drops in the Bucket

At first

each drop

makes its

own pock

against the tin,

In time

there is a

thin lacquer

which is

layered and

relayered

till there's

a quantity

of water

with its

own skin

and sense

of purpose,

shocked at

each new violation

of its surface.

Losses

Most losses add something-

a new socket or silence,

a gap in a personal

archipelago of islands.

We have that difference

to visit--- itself

a going-on of sorts.

But there are other losses

so far beyond report

that they leave holes

in holes only

like the ends of the

long and lonely lives

of castaways

thought dead but not.

The Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,

How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking about the patience

Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,

And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.

And what is more generous than a window?

---Pat Schneider

The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn't change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can't get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.

You don't ever let go of the thread.

--William Stafford

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

--William Stafford

A few resources for short texts

Collections of poems and short readings

Joy: 100 Poems, ed. Christian Wiman

How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times, ed. Annie

Chagnot and Emi Ikkanda

Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times, ed. Garrison Keillor

In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, Ed. Judith Kitchen and Mary P.

Jones

Hearing the Call Across Traditions: Readings on Faith and Service, ed. Adam Davis

The Civically Engaged Reader, ed. Adam Davis and Elizabeth Lynn

Online resources:

A Network for Grateful Living, www.gratefulness.org

The Writer’s Almanac, poem of the day, https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-

writers-almanac?

The Slowdown (with Tracy K. Smith), https://www.slowdownshow.org/

The Center for Civic Reflection, https://civicreflection.org/

Short film:

“James – Moving On” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWPgJkOdUZU

“History of a Sign” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ux90HFe7Ds

“I will be a hummingbird” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-btl654R_pY