Here is a poem, important to me...which I have kept close to hand for some forty years...It still speaks to me and instructs me...and delights me...From the within...like Shirley MacLaine in her story (The Camino) of her pilgrimage walk to Santiago de Compostelo...holding an imaginary heart of unconditional love toward a menacing dog. The dog ceased its attack...and she continued on her way...and so here on the internet...we hold out our stories...


An Introduction to Literature
by William Stafford

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don’t understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.

Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.

We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won’t believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.

The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next’ it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but it is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,

Or profit or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming:
Good: now it is time.

-- William Stafford