Have you ever wanted to help…

• Shift a group’s thinking from the tactical to the strategic?
• Add the voice or perspective of the client/recipient to deliberations?
• Reconnect a planning conversation to its original intention?

Poetry gives us permission and access to go through, under or around topics that are resistant to direct approach. You can use poetry to provide the spaciousness and distance that invites curiosity and a different kind of conversation. Enjoy, use, and add to this selection of reflective poems to center yourself or to  open up discussion on a challenging topic with others.

Read what your colleagues have offered and please contact me to add poems here.

– Ted Lord, Senior Partner at The Giving Practice

Use Poetry to Shift Your Perspective

Kevin Walker, president and CEO of Northwest Area Foundation

Here are two poems that help me shift my perspective on challenges in healthy ways. The first, a tiny poem by A.R. Ammons that hangs beside my desk, reminds me not to take myself or our work too seriously. The second is a spectacular little piece by the Australian poet, Les Murray. It reminds me to think big in space and time, but I love the way it circles back in the end (as Murray always does) to people, and our responsibility to one another.

Correction

The burdens of the world
on my back
lighten the world
not a whit while
removing them greatly
reduces my specific
gravity

—A.R. Ammons

Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake

In fact the Earth never stops moving.

Northbound in our millimetric shoving
we heap rainy Papua ahead of us
with tremor and fumerole and shear
but: no life without this under-ruckus.

The armoured shell of Venus doesn’t move.
She is trapped in her static of hell.
The heat of her inner weight feeds enormous
volcanoes in that gold atmosphere

which her steam oceans boil above.
Venus has never known love:
that was a European error.
Heat that would prevent us gets expressed

as continent-tiles being stressed and rifted.
These make Earth the planet for lovers.
If coral edging under icy covers
or, too evolutionary slow

for human histories to observe it, a low
coastline faulting up to a tree-line
blur landscape in rare jolts of travel
that squash collapsing masonry with blood

then frantic thousands pay for all of us.

—Les Murray

Mauri Ingram, president and CEO of Whatcom Community Foundation

This particular poem speaks to both the human condition and the role of community philanthropy. It reminds us that we do what we can to tend, remain aware of our ever changing environment and grasp at control. In community philanthropy, we are accountable and yet in control of virtually nothing (if we are doing our work well). It also speaks to the tension between urban and rural: the constant tug and the differential in their relative gravities. I’ve used spoken word most often as a speed train to help group members to be fully present. My first exposure to the practice was at a conference session on arts and culture. In that case, it also reminded the group of the essence of why we gathered. On a personal level, poetry quiets my mind and opens up my mind to differing points of view. It’s a stretching exercise for my brain.

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
Tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

—Ted Kooser

Use Poetry as a Reminder to Break

Judy Pigott, board member, Satterberg Foundation

I loved this when I happened upon it recently. Now, from the beautiful big sky area that is Sun Mountain, it’s better than ever. And it seems to me to be a most appropriate way to view our inclination to rush toward connection while not knowing how to engage honestly, our desire for economy of scale and efficiency while not knowing how to avoid becoming needlessly caught in bureaucracy.

There Are Many Ways to Move Through Our Day

Think first of tracks – to water, to crops, even the latrine –
trails to neighbors, to shady groves along the river,
to secret berry patches, the grassiest meadows always just over
the mountains, across deep currents, the stretch of seeing:

how paths become rutted, become dirt roads, become gravel, black pavement,
whoosh of car and car, lumbering bus, swaying semi-trucks,
then wide freeways and finally airplane scribbles in the sky, the once dark
glowing with glittering satellites. Things change. Often

what’s meant gets lost in saying: space, I guess, is near. Time zips
quicker, flash of a sent text, that new highway. Words gather their heavy loads,
meaning from many directions. Perhaps, today, we can remember

those trucks toward clear water, first bridges, the secret trails to a meadow,
berry vines, and the lines that bind all of us. Sometimes, we can pick
our routes. We can choose to say connect and mean closer together.

—Tod Marshall

Richard Woo, CEO of The Russell Family Foundation

Although it urges action, it does so in the belief that getting lost in purposeful work is a virtue.

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

—Marge Piercy

Use Poetry as a Reminder to Create Space

Ted Lord, senior partner of The Giving Practice

This is one of my all time favorites.

The Low Road

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

—Marge Piercy

This piece is first on my list of poems that spur reflective practice and has done the most to inform my practice in the last decade.

Fire

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

— Judy Brown

Use Poetry to Start a Conversation

Shin Yu Pai, Grants & Workplace Giving Manager at ArtsFund

Rhina Espaillat’s poem “Significant Other” can be used to start a conversation about exclusion, race, ethnicity and culture.

Significant Other

This is for you, Miss Ridley, who made clear
in ‘forty-seven—high school, junior year–
that you would not pronounce, much less condone,
barbaric names like ours. You made it known
at once that we would change, like obscure books
translated. And our disbelieving looks
at rollcall never altered your idea
that I’d learn to be “RYE nah,” as Sophia
Papadopoulos must answer to “Soh FIE ah”
and shy Maria Guzman became “Maw RYE ah.”

You could not whittle us into those new
fictions remade in your own image, true
daughters of Albion; we were marked by then
by sound and sign, the legacies of men
and women of all stripes, from every shore.
We recognized ourselves, the names we bore,
solid as coins history had imprinted,
unwilling to be melted and reminted.
But every morning, doggedly set right,
you would repeat the wrong. You were not bright.

How did it end? Not badly: six refused,
at last, to answer “Present.” You accused
us of impertinence, and sent us to
the Principal herself. We never knew
her verdict; we were quietly dismissed
after an uneventful hearing, and the list
bearing our names and her few notes remained
on her oak desk. Our records went unstained.
And by the next day’s rollcall we discerned
change in your method, and our names returned,
pronounced not well, but, well, the best you could.

We learned a lot from you: to define “good”
in broader terms than yours; how to defend
ourselves within what law we would amend;
how to make room, among us all, for each;
how not to be afraid; how not to teach!
How some, recalled for scenes we do not miss,
give us our arms. Too late, I give you this.

Agenda, vol. 41

-Rhina P. Espaillat