Skip to main content
Like
Create new Glog
previous
next
Email share
139 views | 0 likes | 0 reposts
The Weighing
A hand
The task
The heart's reasonsseen clearly,even the hardestwill carryits whip-marks and sadnessand must be forgiven. As the drought-starvedeland forgivesthe drought-starved lionwho finally takes her,enters willingly thenthe life she cannot refuse,and is lion, is fed,and does not remember the other.So few grains of happinessmeasured against all the darkand still the scales balance.The world asks of usonly the strength we have and we give it.Then it asks more, and we give it.
It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.We wake into it daily - open eyes, braid hair -a robe unfurledin rose-silk flowering, Then laid bare. And yes, it is a simple enough taskwe've taken on,though also vast:from dusk to dawn, From dawn to dusk, to praise, and notbe blinded by the praising. To lie like a cat in hotsun, fur fully blazing and dream the mouse;and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watchwithin the deep rooms of the house,where the leaf-flockedsunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.
A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.Nor is it palm and knuckles,not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.A hand is not the thick thatch of its lineswith their infinite dramas,nor what it has written,not on the page,not on the ecstatic body.Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping--not sponge of rising yeast-bread,not rotor pin's smoothness,not ink.The maple's green hands do not cupthe proliferant rain.What empties itself falls into the place that is open.A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
Jane was born in New York in1953. She gradguated from Princeton University. Later she studied at the San Francisco Zen Center and had to give up her poetry for 8 years. Jane has received many awards for her 6 books. Given Sugar, Given Salt was her fith book and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.Jane taught at the University of California, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and was the Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. The I poem "The Ink Dark Moon" was translated by the two best women poets of classical-era Japan.
Jane grew up in a house with music and lots of poetry
Biblogrophay Jane Hirshfield : Poems and Biography.Poetry Chaikhana - Sacred Poetry from Around the World: Sufi Poetry, Zen Poetry, Hindu Poetry, Buddhist Poetry, Christian Poetry, Yoga Poetry. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2011. . Jane Hirshfield - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Apr. 2011. . " Jane Hirshfield Biography." eNotes - Literature Study Guides, Lesson Plans, and More.. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2011. .
