how to pay attention
a poem to begin each day
Tag Archives: empathy
Day 124 | New Stanzas for Amazing Grace by Allen Ginsberg
New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
Allen Ginsberg
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
O homeless hand on many a street
Accept this change from me
A friendly smile or word is sweet
As fearless charity
Woe workingman who hears the cry
And cannot spare a dime
Nor look into a homeless eye
Afraid to give the time
So rich or poor no gold to talk
A smile on your face
The homeless ones where you may walk
Receive amazing grace
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
Day 122 | Every Morning by Mary Oliver
Every Morning
Mary Oliver
I read the papers,
I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
The way the red mortars, in photographs,
arc down into the neighborhoods
like stars, the way death
combs everything into a gray rubble before
the camera moves on. What
dark part of my soul
shivers: you don’t want to know more
about this. And then: you don’t know anything
unless you do. How the sleepers
wake and run to the cellars,
how the children scream, their tongues
trying to swim away–
how the morning itself appears
like a slow white rose
while the figures climb over the bubbled thresholds,
move among the smashed cars, the streets
where the clanging ambulances won’t
stop all day–death and death, messy death–
death as history, death as a habit–
how sometimes the camera pauses while a family
counts itself, and all of them are alive,
their mouths dry caves of wordlessness
in the smudged moons of their faces,
a craziness we have so far no name for–
all this I read in the papers,
in the sunlight,
I read with my cold, sharp eyes.
Day 29 | Rule One by Philip Booth
Rule One
Philip Booth
Rule One of all
rules one:
No one ever knows
how much another hurts.
You.
Kate. Ray. Randall. Me.
The nurses
who were kind to you, the gaspump kid
across the bridge, the waitress here
this noon.
No one ever knows.
Or maybe in a thousand, one
has the toughness to,
to care,
to give beyond a selfish pity. Even
any given day,
given weathers, detours,
chances of what look like luck,
if we feel bad
we refuse the givens.
What blighted lives we lead.
Or follow:
showering, feeding, changing shirts or
pants, working, as one used to say,
to make ourselves presentable.
Partial
strangers to our painful selves,
we’re still stranger to
diminished friends
when they appear
to hurt.
How much we fail them,
failing to come close:
a parent,
newly single, in Seattle;
an upstate poet in intensive care.
You. Blanche. Alvin. Sue.
Who hurts
and why.
Why we guess we know.
How much we never.
how to pay attention 