Global Facilitation Poetry

Do you have a poem or inspirational quote that you like to share with your groups? My goal is to create this page of uplifting materials that we can all share with our groups to help give focus. Can you contribute? Please email me your content for upload. It would be wonderful to see it in its original language (if not English) and with an English translation, if possible.

And Then There Were the Fires

BY ALICE WALKER

Visit her poem by clicking here

Harvest Poem

BY JENNY HEGLAND

Touching our thought bubbles with a feather

Relaxing, reacting

Groundlessness and certainty

The search inside yourself

 

Labeling, recognizing, judging

Peace is in the present

The practice happens in the now

Sometimes I cry, sometimes I sob

 

If you didn't pause, it could throw you off

Through heart expansion we grown into grok

What are your practices? What do we practice together?

How we organize reflects how we relate

 

Voice is welcome in generative spaces - encouraged, even

Collective energy is generated through shared practice

Toward what is in sync, what is in service

Resonance, harmony, alignment, love

 

It is a commitment 

It is how we eat

It is in our eyes

It's how we receive

 

It is harmony

It is our sound

It is our anthem

It's slowing down

 

It is softening

It is our anchor

Flying into our freedom

Flowing into our song

 

Holy

BY ABDUL ALI

1.

Always, they begin
as units of prayer

in sleep
watery images

then I wake
seeing them

crowded together
in a headline

Officers in Bronx Fire 41 Shots,
And an Unarmed Man Is Killed

this lacerated tongue
thirsts to remember

the names of all the faces
hidden behind the barrel of a gun

loaded blasted
into national memory

becoming caesuras.

Each name is
a body craving
wholeness.

2.

These eyes shutter
imagining

a different script
playing out behind their lids.

3.

When I wake tomorrow
Let there be a riot of birds

outside my window
Let there be crows

flying South in horseshoe formation
Let there be Peruvian musicians

with their wooden flutes
& African drummers

& children double-dutching
over liberated firehydrants

Let there be Nina Simone’s
“Mississippi Goddamn” remixed

Let these words serve
a different master/narrative

Let sound shoot outside this mouth
echoing in every

walk home
dark alley
(neighbor)hood

May this poem
lodge inside your breast.

Abdul Ali, “Holy” from Trouble Sleeping. Copyright © 2015 by Abdul Ali.

Quiet Grass, Green Stone

BY DEAN YOUNG

I love when out of nowhere

I love when out of nowhere
my cat jumps on me
and my body isn’t even surprised.

Me who wants to be surprised by everything

like a dandelion

like a bottle cap

cricket cricket.

I keep waiting for the god under the anthill to speak up.
I keep waiting for the part of the myth
where everyone turns into a different bird
or the reeds start talking
or horses come out of the ocean
in their parliamentary regalia
and cities grow from their hoofprints.
I keep waiting for the bugle
and the jackal-headed god to weigh my heart across the river.

All this daylight in just a few moments
pours itself into darkness. More and more
I’m satisfied with partial explanations
like a fly with one wing, walking.

Dean Young, “Quiet Grass, Green Stone” from Shock By Shock. Copyright © 2015 by Dean Young. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.