You don't believe
by William Blake        (public domain)

You don't believe — I won't attempt to make ye.
You are asleep — I won't attempt to wake ye.
Sleep on, sleep on, while in your pleasant dreams
Of reason you may drink of life's clear streams
Reason and Newton, they are quite two things,
For so the swallow and the sparrow sings.
Reason says 'Miracle', Newton says 'Doubt'.
Aye, that's the way to make all Nature out:
Doubt, doubt, and don't believe without experiment.
That is the very thing that Jesus meant
When he said: 'Only believe.' Believe and try,
Try, try, and never mind the reason why.

 

 

The Sleeping
by Jacinta V. White

There are some who are meant to sleep
and live inside dreams. They come

as visitors to carry
messages from there to now.

You know them. The baby who looks
deeply into your eyes while stealing your heart.

The lover who hypnotizes you,
the old man who speaks in riddles

before falling off to sleep. We shake
them out of selfish yearnings but

do not wake them or chastise them
for not being among the woke.

Some need to sleep so that others
will know what it is like to be alive.

 

“The Sleeping” by Jacinta V. White, from Resurrecting the Bones. Press 53 © 2019.

Apple Season
by Joyce Sutphen

The kitchen is sweet with the smell of apples,
big yellow pie apples, light in the hand,
their skins freckled, the stems knobby
and thick with bark, as if the tree
could not bear to let the apple go.
Baskets of apples circle the back door,
fill the porch, cover the kitchen table.

My mother and my grandmother are
running the apple brigade. My mother,
always better with machines, is standing
at the apple peeler; my grandmother,
more at home with a paring knife,
faces her across the breadboard.
My mother takes an apple in her hand,

She pushes it neatly onto the sharp
prong and turns the handle that turns
the apple that swivels the blade pressed
tight against the apple's side and peels
the skin away in long curling strips that
twist and fall to a bucket on the floor.
The apples, coming off the peeler,

Are winding staircases, little accordions,
slinky toys, jack-in-the-box fruit, until
my grandmother's paring knife goes slicing
through the rings and they become apple
pies, apple cakes, apple crisp. Soon
they will be married to butter and live with
cinnamon and sugar, happily ever after.

 

Joyce Sutphen, “Apple Season” from Coming Back to the Body. Copyright © 2000 by Joyce Sutphen.