I'm collecting poems and quotes about water.
...And a few earthy ones which are too good to pass up.
Feel free to send more good ones my
way! E-mail them to me at
kirsten@alum.mit.edu.
Ah!!! Water! It's the best thing in the world!
--Kirsten Findell
In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.
-- Kahlil Gibran
An ocean refuses no river.
-- Sheila Chandra
To plunge into water, to move ones' whole body, from head to toe, in its
wild graceful beauty, to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a
delight only comparable to love.
-- Paul Valery, quoted in Haunts of the Black Masseur
The same stream of life that runs through the world
runs through my veins night and day.
It is the same life that emerges in joy through the dust
of the earth into numberless waves of flowers.
-- Rabindranath Tagore
When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into your stone bowl,
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
-- Zen Tea Master Sen-No-Rikyu
all this water talk
after drinking a coffee
makes me need to pee
-- David Senn (a haiku inspired by this web page)
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth;
without rain, there would be no life.
-- John Updike
Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones,
and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
Waterborne
The river is largely implicit here, but part
of what becomes it runs from east to west beside
our acre of buckthorn and elm.
(And part of that, which rather weighs on Steven's mind,
appears to have found its way to the basement. Water
will outwit a wall.) It spawns real toads, our little
creek, and widens to a wetland just across
the road, where shelter the newborn
fawns in May. So west among the trafficked fields,
then south, then east, to join the ample Huron on its
curve beneath a one-lane bridge. This bridge
lacks every grace but one, and that a sort of throwback
space for courteous digression: your turn,
mine, no matter how late we are, even
the country engineers were forced to take their road
off plumb. It's heartening to think
a river makes some difference.
~ ~ ~
Turning of the season, and the counter-turn
from ever-longer darkness into light,
and look: the river lifts to its lover the sun
in eddying layers of mist as though
we hadn't irreparably hurt the planet
after all. My neighbor's favorite spot for bass is just
below the sign that makes his fishing rod illegal,
you might almost say the sign is half
the point. The vapors draft their languorous excurses on
a liquid page. Better than the moment
is the one it has in mind.
-- Linda Gregorson
There's always a period of curious fear between the first
sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes
cracking down.
-- Don DeLillo
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the
spiritual energy of the wind.
-- Annie Dillard
I want nothing
of the river
and it clearly
wants nothing of
me. Yet as it
flows out of the
mountains into
my eyes the heart
becomes a sea.
--Cid Corman
Water--the ace of elements.
Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net.
Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash.
Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters.
Stylishly composed in any situation--soild, gas or liquid--speaking in
penetrating dilects understood by all things--animal, vegetable or mineral--
water travels intrepidly through four dimensions, sustaining... destroying...
creating...
--Tom Robbins, from the preface to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Till taught by pain, men know not water's worth.
--Byron
However quick the stream may be,
It does not carry away the reflection of the moon.
--Traditional Zen proverb
Mizu O Kiku Sureba, Tsuki Te Ni Ari:
Scoop up the water, the moon is in your hands.
--Zen saying by Kido Chigu (1185-1296)
Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the myriad
creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to
be, it comes closest to the way.
--Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching (D.C. Lau, translator)
Rise above the dualities, the opposites. See this whole world as the
bubbles on the surface of water. See people as bubbles on the surface of
the Brahman, of the Infinity...Water bubbles up, rises up. Like that,
everybody is rising and having their own games and plays and dissolving
back into the Infinite.
--Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, from Everything is God
Say you're in the country; in some high land of lakes.
Take almost any path you please, and ten to
one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool
in a stream. There is magic in
it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest
reveries--stand that man on his
legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water,
if water there be in all that
region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your
caravan happens to be supplied with a metaphysical professor.
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation
and water are wedded forever.
--H. Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
Live water heals memories. I look up the creek and here it comes, the
future being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You
may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say,
with satisfaction or with longing, "This is it." But if you look up the
creek, if you look up the creek in any weather, your spirit fills,
and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, "Here it
comes!"
--Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The Cloud
I am the daughter of Earth and Water
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley
...just as the spirit of humanity dwells in the pages of
a book, so does the Spirit of god dwell in the waters of a river. If the
former can elevate our hearts, so undoubtedly can the latter.
...
Much is known to the heart that cannot be expressed, much that is almost
entirely forgotten in the course of an education which concerns itself with
learning to express quite other things. But one thing is certain, namely,
that a river is most emphatically not just a river.
--Sri Krishna Prem, from Initiation into Yoga
And you, vast sea, sleepless mother,
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmer in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.
--Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet
Give me everything mangled and bruised, and I will make a light of it to
make you weep, and we will have rain and we will have begun again.
--Deena Metzger
Water, water everywhere, not a drop to spare,
Water in the ground, water in the air,
tho' it may evaporate, it never goes away,
Snows onto a mountaintop, flows into a bay,
Animals need water, people need it too,
Keep it clean for me and I'll keep it clean for you.
-- From a children's sing-along CD, artist un-remembered
The dream of my life
is to lie down by a slow river
and stare at the light in the trees ~
to learn something by being nothing
-- Mary Oliver, from "Entering the Kingdom"
Sat Narayan Wha Hey Guru,
Hari Narayan Sat Nam.
--Age-old yoga chant
here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain
and here's to silent certainly mountains; and to
a disappearing poet of always; and to snow
and to morning; and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight (and a first dream called ocean)
--e.e. cummings
I thank the earth for feeding my body,
I thank the sun for warming my bones,
I thank the trees for the air I breathe,
And I thank the water for nourishing my soul.
--Leah Wolfsong
And if the earth has forgotten you
Say to the still earth: I am flowing.
To the rushing waters say: I am.
--Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus
What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.
--Hassidic proverb
Spring Pools
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods -
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
--Robert Frost
A lifetime without Love is of no account
Love is the Water of Life
Drink it down with heart and soul!
--Jalaluddin Rumi, Divan-i-Shams 11909