One Far-Flying Arrow

from The Brimming Sea

By Ibn Arabi

Then the secret was there in my heart

and I was gone and my star set away

my heart by my lord's secret changed and I

absented from the body's feeling frame

wherefrom therewith I came

upon a ship of my high resolution

my fortress thoughts therein disposed

through a dark gulf of what I knew

unthought

and on my ship my longing blew

as winds, and so it passed

an arrow's passage through the sea

and across that sea Approach I cut

till I perceived unsecret what

was without name. You!

I said, by my heart seen!

I loose an arrow at your love

for you are dear to me

and you are my festivity

the end of all my passion and my prize.

--Translated by Robin Moger

One Abated Sun

from The Complaint

By Thomas Hoccleve

I see well, since I with sickness last

Was scourged, cloudy hath been the favour

That shone on me full bright in times past;

The sun abated, and the dark shower

Hilded down right on me, and in languor

Me made swim, so that my spirit

To live no lust had, ne no delight. 

....

For though that my wit were home come again, 

Men would it not so understand or take. 

With me to deal hadden they disdain: 

A riotous person I was and forsake. 

Mine old friendship was all overshake...

One Abandoned Bloom

I abandoned
my hometown
with cherry trees
in bloom

--Issa

One Unfound Seeker

Mauve blames me for saying, I’m an artist – which I won’t take back, because those words naturally imply always seeking without ever fully finding. It’s the exact opposite of saying, ‘I know it already, I’ve already found it’. To the best of my knowledge, those words mean ‘I seek, I pursue, my heart is in it’. 

--Vincent van Gogh, May 7, 1882

One Milky River

 She weaves and ends no pattern to day

                                Milky way girl

and the heavy ox pulls and pulls

to the end of the day no pattern

Via lactea clear and shallow

far from each other

                                one wide river to cross

--Anonymous Han dynasty poet, translated by Ezra Pound

One Steady-Tacking Ship

from Homeworld 

By Don Domanski

this is the growing of things     birthing of skin
and bone stem      and leaf      this is planet
earth beneath snowlight and desert sand
this is the place to find human beings walking down
the street with their souls drifting just ahead of them
with their faces half-lit by their own eyes

this is where you find the bodied and unbodied
living and the dead     also apple seeds and moonfish
swimming by      with heartbeats like fingernails
pinching and releasing flesh      their minds turning
in their sockets once every hour

                              ~

... where God and the absence of God are interchangeable
where the prayer on the lips and the claw in the pulse
send the same message to the stars.

                              ~  

in this world every life is a grubstake and a courtship
with affections foraging and fretting beneath the sun’s heat
with rootings of pain running down deep into soil
with sorrows immaculate and tacking steadily ahead
        every grief transfixed on a breath
        every teardrop tigering through a vein