Dhamma Wheel Buddhist Forum

My literacy is weak... when I read poems, my understanding is bleak.

Life

pass by
and die

Some of my favourites...
From Soma Sutta:
That state so hard to achieve
Which is to be attained by the seers,
Can't be attained by a woman
With her two-fingered wisdom.

What does womanhood matter at all
When the mind is concentrated well,
When knowledge flows on steadily
As one sees correctly into Dhamma.

One to whom it might occur,
'I'm a woman' or 'I'm a man'
Or 'I'm anything at all' —
Is fit for Mara to address.

From the late Ven Master Hsuan Hua in his Dharma talk entitled, 'When People Don't Like You'
If your ideas aren't working,
look within yourself.
If you are kind to people
and they don't reciprocate,
take a look at your kindness.
If you give people orders
and they don't follow them,
take a look at your orders.
If you pay respect to people
and they don't return it,
take a look at your manners.

From the Diamond Cutter Sutra:
If one sees me in forms,
If one seeks me in sounds,
He practices a deviant way,
And cannot see the Tathagata.

All conditioned phenomena
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows,
Like dew drops and a lightning flash:
Contemplate them thus.

We do, doodly do,
What we must, muddily must,
Til we die, diddly die
And turn to dust
Bodily dust.

--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Observing the Moon’s
Reflection in a pond
Frog is heard
Moon is gone

Buddha In Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

bump

HEAVEN
by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

So blue is the ocean,
Infinite is the mind.
So bright are the heavens,
Luminous is the mind.

Expanse of heaven
Meets with deep blue ocean.
Union at horizon
Takes me beyond breath.

Heaven is bullshit.
And hell the religion of fear.
Man needs no God
Freedom is innate.

http://dpr.info/art.poetry.heaven.htm

.

“As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.”


― Hughes Mearns

In the midst of the foggy land that is I
A weathered sign with no road passing by

Its arrow points the same old way
Towards foggy moores and foggy days

I look for names and signs in vain
All erased by wind and rain

It was my journeys final stay
When did it go, and lead me astray

I search that word like I am blind
A word to show me what I left behind

In the midst of the foggy land that is me
A scary roadless sign I see

(Inger Hagerup)

This Only

by Czeslaw Milos



A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

And before the Wise Ones appeared,
Forty million years of ducks in the mud.

Blowing out a candle
ten thousand miles away
Cutting up a duck for dinner.

A dog barks at nothing,
a thousand ducks twitch--
winds of winter.

Has a duck the Buddha-Nature?
"Sssshhh!
Stop quacking like a duck."

- Michael P. Garofalo, Above the Fog