This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome. Right now I'm a little confused because I was told we were going to start at 840. And it's only 8.32. But you're here. Stragglers that are still coming from the dining room. But you're here. And we're here. So welcome. And it's my great privilege and honor and pleasure to introduce Naomi Shihab Nye. I constantly forget just how many awards and prestigious... Swept from the room.

[01:08]

Swept from the room. The Laner Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Library of Congress Fellowship, a long list of citations, book awards. Okay. But it is true. I think everyone's experiences when they meet Naomi, her vivaciousness, her friendliness, her openness sort of makes you forget that any of that has any bearing on what's happening. Yeah, good. And the late stragglers have arrived. So all is well. And there's one here.

[02:15]

If you want to sit up front on cross-legged. So. Good evening, and we're so happy to welcome you to our poetry circle. and this evening is dedicated to the poems in every life.

[03:16]

Coming to Tassajara has been one of the great gifts of many of our lives, and to be here with you tonight is an added gift. We'd like to open with a little Creek Anthem, a group Creek Anthem we wrote today to our friend, friend of all of us, the creek. In years past, you sang to us. When we were younger, were you younger too? You were laughing at our baggage, singing, nothing, nothing, nothing do I need. The creek is home. I renew my acquaintance with Turtle, Stellar Jay, watch a silverfish flash and disappear.

[04:22]

The creek, my Tassajara hallway. I treat love that in places my clarity, my transparency can make me invisible to anyone not paying attention. The creek carries the blessings my therapist had for me the day he missed our appointment and was carried to the Curtis Shore. Creek whores over stones made smooth over time. Running, running, background music to our days of Tessahara. It's song, the gift we take in our hearts as we part.

[05:25]

The rains came early and stayed late, feeding her. And she flows with abundance, nourishing young plants. The creek and I share the same joy. We see the young steelhead swimming by, the square-backed turtle taking a plunge into its waters, and the cellar jay resting above with her babies singing in chorus. Creep, slap my line, fissure, walk heart leaps, shatter them into glitter falling into your sandy heart. Cool waters chill my tones as I slowly delight in the sensation of my sinking body. Burbling coldness rushing over submerged belly, adding molecules of humanness to the flow.

[06:34]

First night, creek scoured my mind. Next night, bought it. Stay much longer, nothing won't. I can't believe you began as a cloud. What do we need to rush over us to speak like the stones? On a heart-shaped stone, in the middle of the creek, the canyon wren invited us to differ to high teeth. A fox turtle comes by for just a strawberry and a cucumber sandwich. I wish you well in this moment, knowing I will never see you in the same way again. I embrace and let you go. Late spring, the second year of my displacement, I feel my mind fighting with the river. I wonder what the river is thinking. Batsha said he spent many years learning how to listen.

[07:43]

as things speak for themselves. Silver trail of morning, you swift the sky, the mirror of our days. The creek rushes past my earplugs and into my dreams, river running through the morning bell and carrying me along the path up the stairs and to the zento where I sit on the zapu and start to listen. Water rushes by my ears at all times, carrying clouds and leaves and dreams. The familiar is a race where light bends in a creek, freeing log jams in the heart. All poems are one of the banks of Tassajara Creek. The conversation, the chore, the eccentric, The re-entry, time, and the wah, wah, whine.

[08:48]

Play me your waterfalls. Show me your carvings, only the old ones. Throw through a sandstone boulder as big as an elephant seal. It's good to see you, my old friend. Wash me, heal my wounds, set me free again. Transparent to the rocks below, your churning liquid nothing quenches my blood-black heart. The creek flows but not the stones, not the trees and their flickering shade. The banks go too, don't you think? All the way to the ocean, but they never touch. Is that sad? They hold the creek like a pair of long arms, but they never touch.

[09:53]

Winter runoff erodes still stone. Quiet boulders redirect quick waters. Who influences who? Continuously singing, the creek flows through everything. Flowing to the great ocean and immersing in all being. Flowing back to the mountain source before time had thought. Flowing up into the boundless sky, endlessly fruit. Flowing deep into the earth, mother of all living things. It was like a creak of voices around the room. Thank you all for reading. William Merwin died on March 15th, but his voice remains with us, and I urge anyone to read him, to listen to him, to feel his poems deep inside, and I wanted to share this poem of his after the dragonflies.

[11:10]

Dragonflies, were as common as sunlight, hovering in their own days, backward, forward, and sideways, as though they were memory. Now there are grown-ups hurrying who never saw one and do not know what they are not seeing. The veins in a dragonfly's wings were made of light. The veins in the leaves knew the flowing rivers. The dragonflies came out of the color of water, knowing their own way. When we appeared in their eyes, we were strangers. They took their light with them when they went. There will be no one to remember us. William Stafford, another of... our beloved poets in this circle, in this room, in the world, in the atmosphere.

[12:14]

William Stafford used to answer the question, when did you become a poet with? Well, that's not really the question. The question is, when did you stop being a poet? When we're very little, we're all poets. I have the luxury these days of spending many long hours with a person who is three. And here are two of his poems. Spoken recently. He loves public city buses. Good thing we live downtown across from the bus stop. My bus was going by and it didn't even look at me. It just left me here. Connor, three. And he heard me speak just a tiny bit harshly, he thought, to his father. But since his father is my son, now and then that happens.

[13:18]

And he said this to me. Be nice to my dada. Be nice to my dada. If you are not nice to my dada, you should not have a mouth. Go Connor. Yes, go Connor. Connor's my teacher when we're not here with Paul. And here's, I like to read at least one that's come out of the writing this week. So my mother, who's here with me, she's not in the room tonight, but Miriam, she's turning 92 soon. Tassajara is her favorite place on earth. And the other day she said, look at that newspaper on that table. No one's getting anywhere near it. So that was the quote at the top of this poem.

[14:21]

Poor paper. We love your folds, the savory scent of your pages. I'll take the art or style or book section. You take the front. But not today. What a complicated shadow you've become. You remind us of everything we'd like to forget. But wait, the wooden table holding you, still sturdy and wooden, still true. We can watch the light shift on your pages, even from a distance. How much it means now to know everything changes. And so we've had a very active week of writing and it's still going on in here. And we always create a mandala every year of things that are inspiring or encouraging or beautiful or that we might draw upon at different times and want to share with one another.

[15:31]

All year I draw upon this sustenance of Tassajara and my desk looks a little like this and that sense that we could walk down a road or encounter a friend or encounter the silence and something new would happen is very, very precious. So I thought I would read a couple of very new poems from the last two weeks before coming here. Well, this one from the last two weeks. And it's for a dear artist friend I went to college with who died a few weeks ago. This is called His Love. Gene Wesley Elder, leaving his life, wrapping household goods, kitchen cups, spoons, tiny tablecloths, grandma's china plates, enrumpled wrapping paper snagged with ribbons, Brown grocery bags distributed to friends.

[16:34]

Ordering no memorials. Give your money to an artist who needs it. Give my money to artists. Just call my lawyer. Get the money. Take time. Arrange things under trees. Sit with them. Make constellations of cast-offs till beauty rises. No, I'm not scared. I'm just doing what we all do, sooner or later. Lucky I had time to savor, think about what I lived, parcel things out. I wanted the windows and doors left open, long last days, quiet filters, a few opera songs, deleted my emails after writing a final one, The end is near, artist going underground. Remember me, but even more, remember you.

[17:41]

And this is called World of the Future We Thirsted. Stripped of a sense of well-being, we downed our water from small disposable bottles, casting the plastic to street side. We poured high-potency energy tonics down our throats because this time in history had sapped us so thoroughly, and we were desperate. Straws, plastic caps, crushed cans. In a three-block walk, you could fill a sack. As if we could replenish spirits quickly, pitching containers without remorse, who did we imagine would pick them up? What did we really know of plastic spirals in the sea, bigger than whole countries? We had never swirled in one ourselves, as a fish might do, a sea urchin, a whole family of eels,

[18:54]

Did we wish to be invincible, using what we wanted, discarding what we didn't, as in wars, whole cities and nations crumpled after our tanks and big guns pull out? How long does it take to be thirsty again? We were so lonely in the streets, though all the small houses still had noses, mouths, eyes from which we might peer, as our fellow citizens walk their dogs, paws helplessly as the dogs circle trees, tip their heads back for a long, slow slug of water or tea, and never fear, never fear. I've always appreciated how Tassajara has no straws, no ice, no plastic cups, all the things there are too many of So now that poem comes from a future book.

[20:00]

This is something I've never done in my non-tech life. Read from a computer at a reading. But I'm only going to read a couple poems from here. So these are from a book that isn't out yet, and then I'll close with a few things that are out. I've never trusted in this format of doing anything, and sure enough... Doesn't seem to want to do anything. Here we go. Oh, yes. Okay, wait. So that poem is from a book all about trash. About 30 years ago, I received a letter from my city of San Antonio, Texas, asking me if I would be the trash picker-upper for the six flocks in all directions around my house. I know this happened. although I've never met anyone else who received such a letter. And I was asked to sign a form and return it to City Hall, which I did.

[21:01]

It was very convenient for me because I'd already been doing that my entire life. Even as a teenager, I'd done that. So I thought, how do they pick us out? I mean, have they been following us and found out who the people were who already do it? Anyway, I've done it ever since. And so it's a whole book about trash. It was very fun to work on this book, which sounds like a surprise. It doesn't seem like it would be fun, but it was as if you were bathing your own mind, my own mind, when I worked on it, sorry. And so I just wanted to read a couple from this book, and really I think it's a book we could all write. What's happening now? This is too much tech at once for the pencil person. Thank you. Random trash thoughts. You don't find much that's pink. Blocks around elementary schools are surprisingly free of litter.

[22:06]

Good custodians, kids are better than grown-ups. Outside Bonham Elementary, one small white scrap with Party games, handwritten on it. Trash treasure hunt might qualify. You don't find many toys. And what of the mind, the drifting little thoughts that never find a place to land. Once at Kailua Beach on Oahu, half buried in soft sand, we uncovered a perfect yellow bucket and shovel that stayed with us 10 years. Walk the other side of street, find different style trash, sushi boxes, green blistex tube. Look at me, look at me. Old political signs fade outside voting centers till they bend over at the waist, let loose from their legs. A man who ran for mayor last time around drifts into your front yard.

[23:15]

End of August. Someone went crazy with toilet paper. Stalked South Florida Street, wrapping it around telephone poles, weaving the snag of old roots by the bus bench, now white, now tangled, in honor of all that is unclean or heartbreaking or not what we dream. Take that, world. Leavings. People were never trash. Under the highway bridge, in a bombed city, encamped under tarps, people were still sons, teachers, teenagers who wanted better clothes, saxophonists, hairdressers, fruit vendors, bus drivers, DJs, good dancers, grandmas, nurses, photographers, computer experts, maintenance technicians, managers, memories, shoe salesmen, excellent science students. and something terrible had gone wrong along the way.

[24:18]

Maybe it was not their fault, or maybe there were steps they could take toward improvement. But people were never trash, just as leaves were never litter. Roots of a tree go deep. Under the sidewalk, below the ancient foundation, patient beyond measure. What they have to survive. Leaves piling on sidewalks after months of drought deserve to be there as much as we do. Long ago, my friend said, more depends on good timing than on anything else. And even though we were young, I knew he was right. If that single telephone number had stayed safe in your pocket instead of blowing away, a whole different life. A preacher asked, can you imagine having to push every single thing you own everywhere you go on wheels? Try putting all your troubles in a grocery cart, taking them with you every day.

[25:24]

That is what homeless means. Troubles, treasures, all in one cart. A weary woman had appeared at his front door with her mounded burdens, asking if she could park for a while. Camps of refugees exist all over the world where one clean space to sleep away from filth and stench might feel like a miracle. Four. A boy took the bits of trash he found on a walk and dumped them in the yard arranging them as one person's story. First the man lost his sandpaper. His baby was sucking on a blue pacifier. which is kind of like a baby cigarette. But the baby lost it when they crossed the street. He cried very hard. The mom was eating a fried cherry pie. The little girl lost her spelling homework with dust and trust on it. And here it is, see? Too bad, she was a good speller. They all dropped their bus transfers in a big wind and read this torn up newspaper to find out what to do next.

[26:34]

Trash is a ticket to nowhere. It says, I do not care about you, poof. You can pick me up if you want to. The person who dropped me was more important than the person who picks me up. What? Make our smallest moves the right ones. On a San Antonio street called Dallas, at the corner of Baltimore, all of us connected, like it or not, if we're alive, isn't it all ours? Even the street called Cary Grant. Bent wire, styrofoam, snaps. Here's the room of a pizza box from the Mesozoic era. Trash says, disregard, disregard. And the last one I'll read, Georgia O'Keeffe on location. My husband actually interviewed... the man who told the story in the first part.

[27:38]

The housekeeper, Margaret, who worked for the painter Georgia O'Keeffe and her photographer partner, Alfred Stieglitz, plucked streaky photographs from his bin. She pawed through Georgia's own trash, liking what she saw. Discarded sketches, false starts, luminous studies in pink. Considerate rescue. Margaret kept these treasures in the attic of the old family home at Lake George. A long time later, her son got hold of the trove and organized an art show, pinning up half-baked drawings and stained photographs by the corners, like children's artwork over a bed. Wasn't it so interesting to see, in some ways more interesting than anything final or complete? Margaret's son could remember Georgia slapping him across the cheek when he was small.

[28:43]

Clearer in memory than the days they got along. Number two. At Ghost Ranch in New Mexico's desert, Georgia built her own home atop an ancient rattlesnake nest. Not knowing. Not knowing. forever while painting large, calm canvases in her open garage, Georgia would be beating insulted snakes off with her cane. So it goes into some other histories of trash experiences, but there's also a very interesting story website from the man who picked out of John Updike's trash for many years and has had his own shows as well. But he felt that John Updike didn't mind.

[29:47]

I mean, the concept is interesting. So it's like reclamation of other people's refuse. So I'll just close. Do you need to say anything? You don't have to close yet. Well, I'd like to read a few poems from a book called The Tiny Journalist. This is my most recent book. And it's dedicated to children who are activists in difficult regions of the world. There are so many of them. Particularly in the case of this book, to Janna Jihad Ayad and her cousin Ahed Tamimi, who was a Palestinian teenager who went to jail for seven months. You may have read about her for slapping a soldier. who came into her own house. But Jenna has not gone to jail, as far as I know. She's younger, she's only about 13 now. And she decided when she was a child, growing up in her West Bank village, very near the village where my Palestinian grandmother lived to be 106, that there were enough journalists around taking note of what goes on there.

[30:57]

So she decided she would become one. So this book is an odd mingling of, I guess, an ongoing dream that I was steeped in as a child with a Palestinian refugee father who always talked to me when I was first growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, a place where there were no other Arabs and not many Jewish people either, that Arab people and Jewish people were brothers and sisters, and that politics was dividing them in a way that was very tragic. And this is mysterious when her father keeps telling you this story over and over and you keep looking around, where are all these people? I was more interested in other divisions of Ferguson, Missouri, but curious about this one. So years would pass. I would go to live there as a teenager and then would travel there many, many times.

[31:59]

So my father's lifelong hope and quest for a justice which included everyone would become my own as well and so many other people's. And over the years to have an opportunity to meet with so many devoted practitioners of faith The idea that cooperation could exist even there. And why not? Such a tiny place. So many shared qualities amongst all the people. So it's been frustrating seeing the divisions continue. Seeing that very ugly wall exist. Living in a state where everybody I know is fighting against a wall on our southern border. and all the landowners are fighting against that wall, and just feeling kind of the repetition, the cycle of what's not our best selves being encouraged.

[33:00]

So this book is called The Tiny Journalist, and it really only has one sentence in it, which comes out of Jana's own mouth, but it's talking about her story and her advocacy. I always was one of those old-fashioned poets who thought I would never have anything to do with social media, but did join Facebook and Instagram so I could follow her, and it's been worth it. Morning song for Jenna. The tiny journalist will tell us what she sees. Document the moves, the dust, soldiers blocking the road. Yes, she knows how to take a picture with her phone. holds it high like a balloon. Yes, she would prefer to dance and play, would prefer the world to be pink. It is her job to say what she sees, what is happening. From her vantage point, everything is huge, but don't look down on her.

[34:04]

She's bigger than you are. If you stomp her garden, each leaf expands its view. Don't hide what you do. She sees you at 2 a.m. adjusting your impenetrable vest. What could she have that you want? Her treasures? The shiny buttons her grandmother loved? Her cousin? Her uncle? There might have been a shirt. The tiny journalist notices action on faraway roads, farther even than the next village. She takes counsel from bugs, so puffs of dust find her first. Could that be a friend? They pretended not to see us. They came at night with weapons. What was our crime? That we liked respect as they do? That we have pride? She stares through a hole in the fence, barricade of words and wire, feeds the rising fire before anyone strikes a match.

[35:08]

She has a better idea. And this is Moon Over Gaza. I am lonely for my friends. They liked me, trusted my coming. I think they looked up at me more than other people do. I, who have been staring down so long, see no reason for the sorrows humans make. I dislike the scuffle of bombs blasting very much. It blocks my view. A landscape of grieving feels different afterwards, different sheen from a simple desert, rubble of walls, silent children who said my name like a prayer. Sometimes I am bigger than a golden plate, a giant coin, and everyone gasps. Maybe it is wrong that I am so calm. common question kids in the Middle East ask me because they know I live in Texas is if I've ever seen the first animal mentioned in this poem exotic animals book for children armadillo means little armored one some of this become some of us become this to survive in our own countries I would like to see an armadillo crossing the road

[36:41]

Our armor is invisible, it polishes itself. We might have preferred to be a softer animal, wouldn't you? With fur and delicate paws, like an African striped grass mouse, also known as zebra mouse. In Northern Ireland, they called it the Troubles. What do we call it? The very endless nightmare, the toothache of tragedy. I call it the life no one would choose. To be always on guard, never secure, jumping when a skillet drops. I watch the babies finger their cups and spoons and think they don't know yet. They don't know how empty the cup of hope can feel. Here in the land of tea and coffee offered on round trays a million times a day, still a thirst so great you could die every night longing for a better life.

[37:50]

I really want to praise all of the people, Jewish and Jewish, Palestinian who have worked so hard in projects like Oasis of Peace, Village, Nevi Shalom, Wahat al-Salam, or the Seeds of Peace Project, or the Hand in Hand Schools, on and on. There's a camp in New Mexico, Creativity for Peace Camp. There's so many initiatives, so many beautiful initiatives that work bringing these two groups of people together. No problems. Well, if there are problems, they work them out. And the fact that politics has continued to go backwards when people try so hard to go forwards is disheartening. So in this book, half of the book is about Janna and Palestine and Israel. And then the other half kind of branches out to the larger world.

[38:57]

Advice. My friend, Diane, said, do the hard thing first. Always do the hard thing and you will have a better day. The second thing will seem less hard. She didn't tell me what to do when everything seems hard. So these are from the branching out section. Freedom of speech. What the head of school told me. We would appreciate... If you would not, you know, in this strange climate, taking all into account problems we have had, misunderstandings, angry parents, insults, Facebook postings, teachers being fired, demonstrations, floods, mention the president. And... And so this is a dream I had in which my father, who was also a journalist, a newspaper journalist, was speaking to Jana in the dream.

[40:07]

And so I'll close with this and one other. The old journalist talks to Jana. From beyond the trees, I appreciate your efforts. I see you stand, hands up, saying, move back to the ones with guns. This was never easy for me to do. After seeing my friend kill, I feared. I loved my life, did not want my mother to grieve. He were braver than I was. His blood spilled over the bench where we had been sitting. It's hard to describe how dust settles, but we all know it does. How the bird returns to the nest where With no apology, the brother disappears for decades, then says, I was never mad at anyone. I was just hurt. Words circulate like breezes in the evening after a long, hot day.

[41:12]

I want to say, take care of yourself. We need you. It is possible we have to be losers, dear Jenna. In the big picture, who cares who won or lost? I always thought about dignity, grace, truth. I thought about enduring. Maybe losers get to be taken care of. The truth is, we were so wronged and so forgotten, we had to become heroes to survive it all. You speak the bell ringing, the wake-up call, and I am sending you the last scraps of energy I had in my pockets when I died. And the last poem in the book is this. Tiny journalist blues. Nothing to give you that you would want. Nothing big enough but freedom.

[42:14]

So thank you for listening. I feel touched just to say her name in your company. I've never met her yet. but I hope to. I think it's possible in life as a writer to think in terms of, you know, not just your own voice, but collective voices. I think we all try to do that. You know, the voice of the creek, the voice of a faraway girl who's lived a much harder life than I have. the voice of the kids in the camps in Texas right now. It's just impossible to grasp what's going on there and how it will be solved. But we have to keep hoping it will be because what else? So thank you for your calm spirits and good wishes to all the world when we're in a peaceful place like this.

[43:25]

just feel like sending those beams out to all the places where it's not as easy. I met some 17-year-old refugee boys from Syria and England last year, and I said, right this minute, what would you want most? And they said, to talk to our moms. And they just stood there. That was it. And to do this workshop in the company of Paul Haller, all of you who visit Tassajara or for students here, you know it's the greatest gift anyone could be given to have that honor and that calm to carry forward. So Paul, thank you always for listening and encouraging all of us and writing with us. And I think now Paul has agreed that he will read a few of his pieces from Paul Haller.

[44:30]

This week. At dinner. At dinner. Yes. And everyone would be very happy if you did, right? Just put your hands up like this. Yes. Look at this, Paul. It's a fanfare. What a second. But he was ready. That's it. This person, I know this is also a little bit sound, but there's a person who sleeps on the front step, on the front porch of the city center, which belongs to the San Francisco Zen Center. And I've known this person over about 15 years. And when I first met him, he was a very fastidious, dapper dresser, you know?

[45:31]

And now he's homeless. This is... This is to Brian, his name. He goes to sleep early, around 9.30, sleeps until 7.30, curled up in a sleeping bag on the front porch of city center. Over the years, he's changed from a deeply troubled but dapper gent to a scruffy, bright-eyed vagabond. Without obligations, he comes and goes at his own choosing. sometimes asking about Zion, sometimes asking about breakfast. Who knows? Who can pronounce the formula for a successful life? Right. One of the exercises we had this morning was conversations.

[46:42]

You know, just jump into a conversation that you had. And this is a conversation I had this morning before we went to the class to talk about conversation. I can find it. He said, men would still be in trees if a woman hadn't said to them, go down there and make something happen. In response, I offered, that's it. The ambitions of men's hopes directed by the visions of women's dreams.

[47:45]

We laughed, turned together to look at the roses, and I thought, finally, she's forgiven her mother. That's it. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[48:23]

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