Your Sunday Poem

This by Ruth Stone from her book, "What Love Comes To; New & Selected Poems"

From Where We Are 

Embedded in the navel
of the belly of our goddess,
we are deeper in
and closer to her viscera.
That is why,
in the gurgles of her vast digestion,
we are shaken with thought waves
in her fiery pores, in the gluons
that flicker
in her infinite intestines,
pouring out of her
the eternal roar.
Our galaxies blink in the
skin of her navel
as we perceive her ecstatic curvature.

Your Sunday Poem

This droll piece is by Ruth Stone from "What Love Comes To.  New & Selected Poems."

The Follies of My Youth 

 It's taken me eighty-five years
to become mediocre.
How brilliant I was;
how I threw it away like used Kleenex.
I never walked the side streets of New York,
I never played tennis,
I never swam in the Olympic pool --
I know my boundaries.

My neighbor's daughter
married into the Hogg Drugstore
and died of uterine cancer at thirty.
What was all that for?
At a party given by this new rich family
I ignored my partner, the short brother.
The short brother and the tall brother
were twins.  I wanted to dance with the tall one.
The short one went inside and cried.
His mother made cruel remarks about me.

Could I have done the same as the neighbor's daughter,
married the short Hogg brother, and died young, too?
Here I am, old and poor.
Where is that short twin now?
Where is his loyal mother?
But I didn't think of bettering myself;
there were too many books in the world.
There was so much I wanted to read.

Your Sunday Poem

This from "What Love Comes To; New & Selected Poems," by Ruth Stone

Yes, Think

Mother, said a small tomato caterpillar to a wasp,
why are you kissing me so hard on my back?
You'll see, said the industrious wasp, deftly inserting
a package of her eggs under the small caterpillar's skin.
Every day the small caterpillar ate and ate the delicious
tomato leaves.  I am surely getting larger, it said to itself.
This was a sad miscalculation.  The ravenous hatched
wasp worms were getting larger.  O world, the small
caterpillar said, you were so beautiful.  I am only a small
tomato caterpillar, made to eat the good tomato leaves.
Now I am so tired.  And I am getting even smaller.  Nature
smiled.  Never mind, dear, she said.  You are a lovely link
in the great chain of being.  Think how lucky it is to be born.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Ruth Stone from "What Love Comes To, New and Selected Poems."

The Dog

The dog is God.
It knows it is God.
It is God living with God.
Even in the rain,
the esters, the pheromones,
calligraphy of the sacred,the great head points into the wind,
the blood thrashes in the thick veins.
The language of the feces, urine,
species, rut, offal, decay --
nothing is hidden from the dog,
who keeps its own cousel,
leading you by the leash.