From George Borrow's "Lavengro"

"What is your opinion of death, Mr Petulengro?" said I.

"My opinion of death, brother . . . is when a man dies, he is cast into the earth . . . and there is an end of the matter."

"And do you think that is the end of man?"

"There's an end to him, brother, more's the pity."

"Why do you say so?"

"Life is sweet, brother."

"Do you think so?"

"Think so! There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind in the heath. Life is very sweet, brother, who would wish to die?"

"I would wish to die . . ."

"You talk like a gorgio - which is the same thing as talking like a fool - were you a Romany Chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed, A Romany Chal would wish to live for ever."

"In sickness, Jasper?"

"There's the sun and stars, brother."

"In blindness, Jasper?"

"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever . . .”

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

- Lisel Mueller

From Hebrews

“But without faith it is impossible to please him; for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of of them that diligently seek him.

By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.

By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:

For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.

Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”

- Hebrews 11:6-13

The Life

Murdered, I went, risen,
Where the murderers are,
That black ditch
Of river.

And if I come back to my only country
With a white rose on my shoulder,
What is that to you?
It is the grave
in blossom.

It is the trillium of darkness,
It is hell, it is the beginning of winter,
It is a ghost town of Etruscans
Who have no names
Any more.

It is the old loneliness.
It is.
And it is
The last time.

- James Wright

From Paul's letter to Timothy

“Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.

But godliness with contentment is great gain.

For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

And having food and raiment let us be therefore with content.”

- I Timothy, 5:5 - 5:8

The Sound of Trees

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

- Robert Frost

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. 
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. 
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall. 
He says the highway dust is over all. 
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing. 
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing. 

- Robert Frost

When I Was Fire

I never mourned. I had to begin
and begin again, with hope,

before I could look back
at what I had done

and to whom. When I was fire
I felt my bull beneath me

in the chute. The sky was a wall
of stuck-shut windows.

I hadn’t thought in this century
it was possible to smell God—

but something in the soil
the very last time. It was there

when I let the bull bolt
from under, circle, and face me.

It was there where I bowed to him
burning.

- Sam Ross, from Company

"...he did not wait, as before,

for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace,” about Pierre’s way of being in the world when falling in love with Natasha

Nikolai visits Marya in Voronezh

“During Nikolai’s brief visit, as usual in a house where there are children, he resorted to Prince Andrei’s little son when there was a moment of silence, stroking his head and asking if he wanted to be a hussar. He took the boy in his arms, began tossing him merrily, and turned to look at Princess Marya. Her tender, happy, and timid gaze followed the boy she loved in the arms of the man she loved.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

From Paul's letter to the Thessalonians

“But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing.

And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed.

Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.

Now the Lord of peace himself give you peace always by all means. The Lord be with you all.

The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write.”

- Thessalonians 3: 13 - 17

Prince Andrei at Borodino

“Prince Andrei opened his eyes and for a long time could not understand what was happening around him. He remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the black, spinning ball, and his passionate fit of love for life. Two steps away from him, talking loudly and attracting general attention to himself, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired sergeant, leaning on a branch, his head bandaged. He had bullet wounds in his head and leg. Around him, listen eagerly to his talk, gathered a crowd of wounded and stretcher bearers.

‘We just pounded him out of there, he dropped everything, we caught the king himself!’ the soldier shouted, looking around him, his black, inflamed eyes glittering. ‘if only the reservers had come just then, brothers, he wouldn’t even have left his name behind, it’s the truth I’m telling you…’

Prince Andrei, like everyone else around the narrator, looked at him with shining eyes and experienced a comforting feeling. ‘But does it make any difference now?’ he thought. ‘And what will be there, and what has there been here?' Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life that I didn’t and still don’t understand…’”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

Tar

The first morning of Three Mile Island; those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it through, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the mean themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.

Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By night fall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

- C.K. Williams

"Prince Andrei, going back into the shed, lay down on the rug, but could not sleep.

He closed his eyes. One image succeeded another. He lingered long and joyfully over one of them. He vividly recalled one evening in Petersburg. Natasha was telling him with an animated, excited face how she had gone to pick mushrooms the previous summer and lost her way in a big forest. She incoherently described to him the dense forest and her feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and, interrupting herself every moment, said: ‘No, I can’t, I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t understand,’ even though Prince Andrei reassured her, saying that he did understand, and indeed he understood everything she wanted to say. Natasha was displeased with her own words; she sensed that she was not conveying the passionately poetic feeling which she had experienced that day and which she wanted to bring out. ‘He was so lovely, that old man, and it was so dark in the forest…and he had such a kind…No, I don’t know how to tell it,’ she said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrei now smiled the same joyful smile that he had smiled then, looking in her eyes. ‘I understood her,’ thought Prince Andrei.”

- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”