A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!²
Those blazing Suns dart a downward
Ray—and fiercely shed intolerable Day—³
Again the day begins—only no one
Wants its Sanity or blinding Clarity—⁴
The ink bleeds out the day’s
Undoing and here we are again: Alive.⁵
Renew thyself completely each day—do it
Again, and Again, and Forever Again …⁶
Let this Day, let this One day, be
Myne—let all the Rest be Thine.⁷
No lashes fringe the sun—
No brows can shade the Day—⁸
Thereinne is Day withouten night—
Withouten ende Strengthe and Might—⁹
Each Day, in itself, brings with it an Eternity …¹⁰
¹ Ummon, The Blue Cliff Record, Case 6
² Emily Dickinson, A Day!
³ Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village
⁴ Philip Levine, The Second Going
⁵ Ada Limón, Flood Coming
⁶ Confucius, quoted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden
⁷ Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion
⁸ Adonis tr. Samuel Hazo, Elegy for the Time at Hand
⁹ Anonymous 13th-14th century poet
¹⁰ Paulo Coelho tr. Alan R. Clarke, The Alchemist