Recipes for Gratitude

poems by

Dick Holmes

ISBN: 978-1-59948-070-1
344 pages (7 X 10)
$19.95

About the Author / Foreword / Samples / Comments

Samples

THERE’S A BOAT

There’s a boat,
a golden boat
with some people in it.
That’s us, the people
in the boat.
And under the boat
is a dazzling river,
dancing its way
to the vast jade sea.
And over our heads,
between the tall trees
on both sides
of the river,
is the bright blue sky,
so blue, so bright.
But where
does the blue begin
and where do our heads end?
What a funny question
to pop up
here in this
blue-sky boat
floating down
this lighthearted river
somewhere in these
sunny heads of ours.

 

I SAT AT THE BAR

All night long I sat at Rumi’s bar
pleading with the bartender to fill my glass,
but he just kept ignoring me.

“Bartender!” I shouted, exasperated.
“Why won’t you fill my glass?”

Finally, as the first rays of the new day
began to lighten the window,
the bartender stopped in front of me and
looked straight at me.
“How can I fill your glass
when it’s already full to the brim?”

“Full? It’s empty!”

“Full of the emptiness of meaningless desire.
Empty your glass of that and I’ll fill it
with the wine of your heart of hearts.”

 

YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING

You wake up in the morning and remember
who you are—well, who you have

decided you are, that is. You still haven’t
experienced who you really are,

though you would like to think you have
some idea about what that would be like.

You wake up in the morning and right away,
still lying in bed, start

talking to yourself in your head,
in the same language you spoke

to yourself the last time
this happened, the day before.

You wake up in the morning and sense that
only a moment before you were somewhere

else in some other time
or nowhere in no time, and

this happens over and over again as God
the Awakener draws you to Himself.

 

SPRING CHICK


“Now to break out of you,
hard shell of thought,
with these words that have
grown with me here inside,”
says the chick, resolving to hatch.
“What other tools are there
for cracking open the
calcified wall of words that
keeps me from seeing the light?”

“Silence is the only tool for that,”
replies the shell.

“Nice try,” says the chick,
“but I know your tricks.
No doubt silence can be
both the tool and the goal,
but it can also be just another
means of containing me,
another hardened word wall
to break through before
the dream of silence can come true.”

 

Foreword


Dear reader,

This book of poems has come to me in the spirit of gratitude, and I pass it on to you in the same spirit. Like a collection of family recipes handed down from generation to generation, these poems have been a long time in the making, though they each originated spontaneously as I worked with whatever ingredients were available at the moment.

Poetry, like food, tastes best when it's prepared with love, and love plays an especially important role in this book of poems centered around gratitude. In fact, love is actually the main dish here and gratitude a sauce to be served with it. Another way to say it: Love is the cook who came up with the recipe for poetry itself. Or love is cook, pot, appetizer, dish, sauce, recipe, and poem all in one. It's especially this feeling of love's all-in-one role in the poetry writing process that motivates me to take pen in hand and join the interplay of love and gratitude.

May these poems of gratitude whet your appetite for the kind of feast only love can provide.

Dick Holmes

About the Author


Dick Holmes teaches in the English Programs for Internationals at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. He lives with his wife Bronia in the Mill Creek area near Columbia. Three of his favorite activities are composing poems, riding his bicycle in the nearby lake country, and communing with God and nature. On a good day, all three happen concurrently.

 

Comments

 

I think God might give me one of the biggest okay-winks He winked in a while -- maybe even winked in the last 13 million years -- if I stole some of these beautiful, lively, significant poems by Dick Holmes and slipped them into the next printing of one of the best selling poetry books -- spiritual anthologies - in America today, called Love Poems from God. Yep, cause there is some wonderful, tasty light here, fermented perfect. So drink, quench the earths in you.

Daniel Ladinsky, best-selling Penguin author of several poetry collections.