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May you

May you lose a lot that matters to you
      a few times in your life—

May you make and remake and
      remake yourself over and again
      and burn yourself right down
      to ashen smoking embers
      of bone and grit and soul—

So that you may always know
      the pain of rock bottom
      the freedom of rebirth
      the hope of revival
      the gift of perspective
      the awareness of your strength—

May you lose but live again.

Terri Guillemets

Quiet desert

“The desert was quiet. The coyotes were not howling yet. I was my own howling coyote. Outwardly a comfortable-looking man in an arm-chair, smoking a pipe, I was inside a half-starved little coyote, out there on the dark desert, howling to the stars.”

—J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter of Autobiography, 1917

Leaves for the Dead

I who have loved the sound of leaves
Restlessly writhing into speech
Desire that to my silent grave
Only leaves shall reach.

So I who walked above the ground,
And leaves that danced before the sun
May meet below to form one dust
And in the earth be one.

When the last wind has stripped the boughs
Some autumn, go out anywhere
To any tree, and look beneath
The leaves:  I may be there.

—Paul Engle, “Leaves for the Dead,” 1929