Children of heroes have glory for breakfast. - William Stafford

"I Have a Witness"

Sometimes a center the soul can recognize
will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or from
a whirlwind ... The world can take, the soul
restores. A million wrong voices proclaim
One light lives forever.

"The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come-maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours.

Lines to Stop Talking By

In your city today outside my room
Some quiet animal or only the rain
At its patient task was opening the wall
By touching it, and whatever was there
Spread outward a bit at a time toward the horizon
Cresting ahead and breaking, the way
All through your life whatever is near extends
When you think. In your city today
I thought of Never, hiding inside
An iceberg floating south rinsed by the days
Till that great blind ice blinks open in the center.
I heard an ambulance carry its banner away
In the rain in your city. And I thought of
My poems- how they are always there
Waiting to try for that circumference
It takes all of us to find.