Poems for You

"Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."

Mary Oliver, from the poem Sometimes in Red Bird

"Starting here, what do you want

to remember?"

"What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room,

when you turn around?"

William Stafford, from You Reading This, Be Ready

in Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

I want to beg you, as much as I can,
to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves

like locked rooms.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Moon Dust

As the story goes,
my 3 year old self
announced to the world
in confidence born of the ages,

that my dad
would get on a ladder
and fix that broken moon

Worlds and decades away,
my dad now passed to the beyond,
I see a meteor light the sky
and say to myself,
it's star dust

with a touch of moon dust,

spun off my dad’s hands
and heart

Kathryn Taylor