What does this have to do with us now?

In May, 2026 we released a new shabad. It is in collaboration with Anshmeet Singh, a budding videographer from India who made a beautiful video to go along with this shabad which I have been working on for the past year.

In the great epic of the Mahabharata, a simple yet piercing moment unfolds. Krishna arrives in the kingdom where Duryodhana rules with power, wealth, and unquestioned authority. The palace is prepared, the finest arrangements are made, and the expectation is clear: the Divine will surely come where greatness has been assembled. Yet Krishna does not go there. Instead, he walks quietly to the humble dwelling of Vidura, a man without status or display, whose home is small but whose heart is open. When Duryodhan hears of this, he is unsettled, even offended. How could the Divine leave grandeur for simplicity? How could a hut be chosen over a palace?

This shabad by Bhai Gurdas teaches us how to invite divinity home. Lets take one line at a time:

ਆਇਆ ਸੁਣਿਆ ਬਿਦਰ ਦੇ ਬੋਲੈ ਦੁਰਜੋਧਨੁ ਹੋਇ ਰੁਖਾ।

Duryodhan hears that the Divine has gone to Vidur’s home, but his hearing is dry, sharp, and reactive. This is the first fracture: hearing without bhaav. In bhagati, listening is not the movement of the ear but the softening of the mind. The “ghar” here is already being tested—what kind of house is it if it cannot receive without comparison? A house without love becomes a place of noise, even if filled with knowledge.

ਘਰਿ ਅਸਾਡੇ ਛਡਿ ਕੈ ਗੋਲੇ ਦੇ ਘਰਿ ਜਾਹਿ ਕਿ ਸੁਖਾ।

He questions why the Divine would leave a palace for a servant’s hut. Here, “ghar” becomes externalized—measured in size, wealth, comfort. But bhagati reverses this. The true house is not built of walls but of bhaav. Where love resides, that is the dwelling. A palace without love is empty; a hut with love becomes vast. The Divine does not move toward luxury—it moves toward warmth.

ਭੀਖਮੁ ਦੋਣਾ ਕਰਣ ਤਜਿ ਸਭਾ ਸੀਗਾਰ ਵਡੇ ਮਾਨੁਖਾ।

Duryodhan lists the great names—Bhishma, Drona, Karna—men adorned in courts, recognized, accomplished. This is the house of reputation, the architecture of recognition. But bhagati does not gather around greatness as the world defines it. It gathers where humility allows listening. The more a house fills itself with status, the less space remains for bhaav.

ਝੁੰਗੀ ਜਾਇ ਵਲਾਇਓਨੁ ਸਭਨਾ ਦੇ ਜੀਅ ਅੰਦਰਿ ਧੁਖਾ।

He says they are pained that the Divine chose a hut. Yet this pain is not the dissolving pain of bhagati—it is the tightening pain of ego. True bhagati, as we saw, sends pain away and brings sukh into the house. But here, the house produces more suffering because it is built on comparison and pride. A house without bhaav cannot hold peace.

ਹਸਿ ਬੋਲੇ ਭਗਵਾਨ ਜੀ ਸੁਣਿਹੋ ਰਾਜਾ ਹੋਇ ਸਨਮੁਖਾ।

The Divine smiles and invites the king to come closer and listen. This is always the gesture: come near, not in position, but in awareness. The house of bhagati begins here—not in argument, but in listening. To come “sanmukh” is to turn inward, to face what is true. The Guru’s path always begins by asking us to listen again, but this time with love.

ਤੇਰੇ ਭਾਉ ਨ ਦਿਸਈ ਮੇਰੇ ਨਾਹੀ ਅਪਦਾ ਦੁਖਾ।

“I do not see bhaav in you.” This is not condemnation—it is clarity. Without bhaav, there is no meeting. The Divine is not absent out of refusal, but because there is no space to dwell. The house is closed. Bhagatī is not technique; it is the opening of the inner house. Where there is no love, the doors remain shut, even if rituals are performed inside.

ਭਾਉ ਜਿਵੇਹਾ ਬਿਦਰ ਦੇ ਹੋਰੀ ਦੇ ਚਿਤਿ ਚਾਉ ਨ ਚੁਖਾ।

“No one holds love like Vidur.” Now the contrast becomes luminous. Vidur’s house is small, but his heart is expansive. His ghar is made of attention, humility, and welcome. This is bhaav bhagat: not singing alone, but singing that listens; not offering things, but offering oneself. His house does not try to impress—it simply receives.

ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਭਾਉ ਭਗਤਿ ਦਾ ਭੁਖਾ ॥੭॥

Gobind is hungry—for bhaav bhagati. This hunger is not for food, not for wealth, not for performance. It is for that state where singing, listening, and loving become one movement. The true house is wherever this happens. When you give your time, when you listen with love, when you dissolve comparison—that is where the Divine arrives, because that is where it is already welcome.

Not Just a Story

In the end, these figures are not just from story—they are within us. Krishna represents the living presence of the Divine, always moving toward love. Vidura is the part of us that is humble, open, and quietly devoted—the inner house prepared with bhaav. Duryodhana is the part that seeks recognition, compares, and tries to host the Divine through status rather than sincerity. Bhagati, as revealed through Guru Nanak, is the movement from Duryodhan to Vidur—from outer house to inner house, from performance to presence, from singing alone to singing, listening, and holding love. That is the house where Gobind dwells.

I am reading a poem by Faiz today. He was in prison when he wrote this, and this poem has the fragrance of freedom. Guru Nanak talks about freedom at the end of Japji Sahib. Those who remember the name walk around with resplendent faces and they are also the ones who have found freedom, despite being imprisoned in this body on this earth. 

Let me introduce the poem, then let's read it and talk about it as well. 

This is a poem that moves like evening itself—slowly folding, dissolving, turning the visible world into something inward. It belongs to that tradition in Urdu-Hindi poetry where twilight is not just a time of day but a state of being: a threshold between separation and union, ظلم (oppression) and possibility, memory and presence. The language is lush with Persianized compounds—पेच-ओ-ख़म, दामन-ए-आसमाँ, दर्द-ए-फ़िराक़—and yet what it gestures toward is deeply intimate: the feeling that even in a wounded world, beauty keeps quietly assembling itself.

What makes this poem powerful is that it never argues hope—it renders it. The sky, the prison courtyard, the trees, the light, the shadows—all of them participate in a kind of silent resistance. By the time we reach the final lines, the poem has shifted from observation to defiance, but so gently that we hardly notice when seeing becomes believing.

Original Poem by Faiz

शाम के पेच-ओ-ख़म सितारों से
ज़ीना ज़ीना उतर रही है रात

यूँ सबा पास से गुज़रती है
जैसे कह दी किसी ने प्यार की बात

सेहन-ए-ज़िंदाँ के बे-वतन अश्जार
सर-निगूँ महव हैं बनाने में

दामन-ए-आसमाँ पे नक़्श-ओ-निगार
शाना-ए-बाम पर दमकता है

मेहरबाँ चाँदनी का दस्त-ए-जमील
ख़ाक में घुल गई है आब-ए-नुजूम

नूर में घुल गया है अर्श का नील
सब्ज़ गोशों में नील-गूँ साए

लहलहाते हैं जिस तरह दिल में
मौज-ए-दर्द-ए-फ़िराक़-ए-यार आए

दिल से पैहम ख़याल कहता है
इतनी शीरीं है ज़िंदगी इस पल

ज़ुल्म का ज़हर घोलने वाले
कामराँ हो सकेंगे आज न कल

जल्वा-गाह-ए-विसाल की शमएँ
वो बुझा भी चुके अगर तो क्या

चाँद को गुल करें तो हम जानें

Translation

The tangled curves of evening—
night descends, step by step,
from the stars.

The breeze passes close by
as if someone has just
whispered love.

In the prison courtyard, the rootless trees
bow their heads, absorbed
in becoming.

Across the sky’s hem, patterns emerge,
and along the rooftop’s edge
something glimmers.

The gentle hand of moonlight—
the water of stars dissolves
into dust.

The blue of the heavens melts into light,
and in green corners, bluish shadows
begin to sway—

the way, inside the heart,
waves of the pain of separation
rise and tremble.

From within, a thought repeats:
life is so sweet
in this very moment—

those who stir poison into oppression
will not prevail,
not today, not ever.

Even if they have extinguished
the lamps of union—
what of it?

Let them try
to put out the moon.

The Best Lines — and Why They Stay

The opening: “शाम के पेच-ओ-ख़म सितारों से / ज़ीना ज़ीना उतर रही है रात” is extraordinary because it refuses a flat description of evening. “पेच-ओ-ख़म” (twists and turns) gives dusk a physical, almost calligraphic texture, and “ज़ीना ज़ीना” (step by step) turns night into a descent you can feel. It is not a sky changing color—it is something arriving, deliberately, like a quiet procession. The line teaches us how to look.

“यूँ सबा पास से गुज़रती है / जैसे कह दी किसी ने प्यार की बात” is deceptively simple, but this is where the poem softens the world. The breeze becomes intimate speech. Nothing dramatic happens, and yet everything changes: the external world is suddenly capable of carrying affection. This is classic subcontinental poetics—turning atmosphere into emotion without announcing it.

The image of “सेहन-ए-ज़िंदाँ के बे-वतन अश्जार”—rootless trees in a prison courtyard—is one of the most layered moments. These are trees that belong nowhere, yet they are “महव हैं बनाने में”—absorbed in becoming, in making themselves. Even in confinement, life is not static. There is a quiet metaphysics here: growth does not ask permission.

Then comes the heart of the poem:
“लहलहाते हैं जिस तरह दिल में / मौज-ए-दर्द-ए-फ़िराक़-ए-यार आए”.
The pain of separation is not described as heaviness, but as waves, even as something that sways or ripples. Pain is alive, moving, almost fertile. This is where the poem turns inward—everything we saw outside (shadows, movement, dissolving light) now mirrors the interior landscape.

The philosophical pivot happens in:
“इतनी शीरीं है ज़िंदगी इस पल”.
This is not naïve optimism. It arrives after images of prison, exile, and separation. The sweetness is not because suffering is absent—it is because life persists despite it. That distinction is everything.

And then the ending—quiet, almost playful defiance:
“चाँद को गुल करें तो हम जानें”
—Let them try to extinguish the moon.

This is one of those rare lines that does not raise its voice but still feels like resistance. It does not deny ظلم; it simply places it in proportion. You can put out lamps, perhaps even erase moments of union—but the moon? That is beyond you. The line expands the scale of hope from the human to the cosmic.

This passage reads less like a checklist of divine qualities and more like a shift in how we’re meant to see. Guru Gobind Singh begins by loosening the familiar idea that God sits somewhere “over there,” a fixed point or a remote authority. Chattr chakr vartee points to a presence moving through every direction and every circle of existence—political, cosmic, psychological. And chattr chakr bhugatai takes it further: the One doesn’t just rule the circles of life from above; the One lives inside them, holds them, even “tastes” them. In this vision, power shows up as closeness.

The next lines widen that closeness into something almost metaphysical. Suyambhav names a reality that arises from itself—self-existent, self-illumined. Yet that kind of sovereignty doesn’t create distance. Sarabadaa sarab jugatai says this same self-existent One is present in all and threaded through all, the inner way things connect. God becomes the unseen coherence of life, the quiet intelligence that makes relationship possible.

Then the poem turns toward lived experience, especially the hard seasons. Dukaalam pranaasee isn’t only about famine or historical crisis. It also names the inner drought: fear, despair, the time when the mind collapses and meaning dries up. The line praises the One as the end of that season, the breaker of the spell. Immediately after, dayaalam saroopai brings tenderness into focus. Compassion isn’t an afterthought here. Mercy has presence. It takes shape. It enters the world in a recognizable form.

The final pair of lines lands the poem’s central tension in a way that feels deeply human. Sadaa ang sangai says the Divine stays close—limb with limb, breath with breath. That intimacy could sound fragile, as if closeness depends on conditions. Abhangang bibhute corrects that. This presence doesn’t crack under pressure. Even when everything burns down to ash, something remains—bibhuti, sacred residue, power that survives change.

Taken together, the passage offers a theology that refuses easy categories. God fills the world without getting diluted by it. God stays close without becoming breakable. God ends the drought and also arrives as compassion you can feel. Guru Gobind Singh gives us a vision where closeness carries authority, relationship carries eternity, and even ash holds a faint, stubborn light.

Meditating Upon Mauli Dharti  

The Music and Artwork

There are some voices that do not fade with time. They change color. Aalam-e-Raushan is a new album of five shabads that listens for those colors. Here is where you can stream the album: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/shivpreetsingh/aalam-e-raushan

The album celebrates the voice of Guru Gobind Singh's voice through his and Bhai Nandlal's words. Two of the compositions are brand new, and three are expansions or completely new versions of my older compositions. The album converses in the languages of the 10th guru: braj bhasha, punjabi, and farsi. 

Rather than treating Guru Gobind Singh as a distant historical figure, this album approaches him as living radiance: a light that instructs, unsettles, consoles, and awakens. In his own words - Sada Ang Sange Abhangam Bibhoote - you are always with me, indivisible from the the ash which comes from your holy fire. 

Each shabad in this collection reveals a different shade of Guru Gobind Singh's light—meditative stillness, ecstatic love, poetic praise, musical wonder, and practical wisdom for living fully awake in the world.

The Shabads & Their Light

Happy Diwali, folks! I’m thrilled to share that my poem “Moondrunk on Diwali” is up at Rattle today—my first published poem.

Huge thanks to Tim Green, Rattle’s editor, for the care he brings to the magazine and the countless hours he gives to poetry. Editing is tough, generous work—making space for others to shine—and from everything I’ve seen these past months, Tim does it in service of poetry.

If you’re new to Rattle: it’s a reader-friendly poetry journal with a subscription base of around 12,000, they read 250,000 poems and publish 300 every year, and their mission is—to promote the practice of poetry. Learn more about Rattle and while you’re visiting, here are three recent poems I loved:

• "Weathering the Storm" - Colleen Farrelly — a science poem, that becomes personal.

• “Vacating” by Michael Brosnan — a thoughtful inventory of work, art, and what we keep.

• “Empathy” by Chelsea McClellan — a devastating and moving poem about pain.

I’ve been learning my way through contemporary poetry for about a decade, but only started submitting to journals last month (mid-September). Four more poems are slated to appear in other magazines soon (The Woolf, Santa Clara Review, UNHOUSED anthology by Prolific Press, Neon & Smoke) —more on that when they land. 

I guess am having some beginner's luck. But its not all luck.  I wanted to thank to a few friends & contemporary poetry teachers who shaped my work: Robert Hass (initial direction in 2008), the late Tony Hoagland (encouragement and generosity to use his poems on my blog), Billy Collins (his poems, his masterclass, his advice on flow, titles, and wonder), Kristen Mears (for editing some of my poetry over the past 2 years), Jane Hirshfield (for her essays, poetry readings and receptivity), Hannah Yerrington (to firm my believe in the poetry of joy/praise), Tess Taylor (for her poetry submissions class), Maggie Queeney (for her form/repetition classes at the Poetry Foundation -- this poem came from an assignment in her class), Maya Popa (for her class on how to review poems).  Also to the Seekers and Seers group who get to bear some of the raw poems I am writing, and still encourage me. 

It was Wallace Stevens’s birthday, so I let myself wander back through the poems of his that have been living, quietly, in my pockets. I’ve written about a handful on my site over the years—how the worldly and the otherworldly pour through him like light through colored glass. 

There’s the wry funeral hymn of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, where pleasure and mortality sit across the same kitchen table; the little fable I once called “proof that life continues after death”, which is really about how imagination won’t stop working even when the world says stop; the bright elegy “Mozart, 1935”, where music keeps the window open; a few philosophical miniatures that felt like stones in the pocket; and the mountain that got traded out for a poem, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.” 

There are three additional ones that I like but I haven't posted yet: Sunday Morning, Anecdote of the Jar, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I have posted those below, 

Every birthday is an excuse to reread, but this time two small tributes found me—poems written for him, or to him, or in his neighborhood. Reading them was like bumping into a friend of a friend who not only remembers your favorite stories but tells them in a new key.

Here’s the first, by David Ignatow:

In Memoriam, 1879–1979
On an Ordinary Evening

by David Ignatow

I am back to walking alone
through silent streets lit by colorful windows
of the homes of responsible men and women,
and I refuse responsibility.
I am weeping without tears,
with hands jammed into pockets
under trees smelling of leaves
and grass of the gardens—
smelling the silence of stolidity
and peace and wanting no peace
until it is written in my poems.

And here’s the second, printed in Mānoa:

Wallace Stevens Walks by the Sea

And now it is that it rises.
Beyond what we can hear,
the whole ocean as a hand
across a mouth. I walk
and it is only this thought.
And it is only this darkness that
lies on the eyes like two coins.
Everything beautiful is also in motion,
isn’t that a curious thing.
If you look closely enough
you fall down a flight of stairs,
the constellations on their little wheels,
the ocean everywhere.

Why do these feel so Stevensy without ever dressing up in his vocabulary? Maybe because they step onto his stage—the everyday world—and speak his verb: to make. Stevens kept reminding us (with the gentle stubbornness of someone who knew both premiums and poems) that art is not something pinned under glass; it’s a present-tense action. In “Of Modern Poetry” he names it plain: “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / what will suffice.” Ignatow’s ending—“wanting no peace / until it is written in my poems”—is that same ethic in work boots. No peace until the making happens.

Ignatow also borrows Stevens’s sidewalk: the city block, “silent streets,” windows lit up with the lives of “responsible men and women.” It’s hard not to hear the long, lucid walk of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven pacing under his lines—the way Stevens tests thought against stoops and hedges, how the metaphysical keeps glancing off a literal windowpane. (If you want just one page to keep by your tea, the Poetry Foundation bio and the lovely Stevens 101 sketch this late style well.)

The sea-walk poem turns the compass the other way—back to water, the great theater of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In Key West, the ocean makes “the constant cry,” and a human voice arranges that noise into something like song; here, the ocean becomes “a hand / across a mouth.” It’s a gorgeous reversal: the inhuman doesn’t shout; it hushes. When the sea covers the mouth, thinking has to sing. That’s Stevens all over—the pressure on the imagination to answer the world, not by escaping it but by answering it in kind.

Then there’s that line, “Everything beautiful is also in motion,” which, if you’ve read Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, feels like a friendly paraphrase of the rule that beauty (and truth) must change. Stevens writes somewhere that reality is the activity of the mind among its images; the tribute poem gives us the mind’s balance problem: look closely enough and “you fall down a flight of stairs,” past the bannister of the visible into “constellations on their little wheels.” That drop—from close domestic detail into starry scale—is a trick Stevens loved, whether in “The Auroras of Autumn” or the sea-mirroring stanzas of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” The last line here—“the ocean everywhere”—reads like a one-line biography of his imagination.

I keep circling back to the mood both tributes share: a kind of lucid sorrow. Ignatow calls it “weeping without tears,” and in Stevens’s own late work the weather is similar—“The Plain Sense of Things” has “this blank cold, this sadness without cause.” But notice what both tributes inherit besides the weather: the remedy. Not denial, not grand consolation—just the honest labor of making. Walk. Look. Think. Make. If there’s peace, it only arrives after the poem, not before.

So on his birthday I end up where I usually end up with Stevens: grateful for the way he lets the ordinary keep its ordinariness while asking it very large questions. Grateful for the brisk hand he lends to newer poets who want to think in the open air. And grateful for how his poems, even when they face the cold, keep a stove going. If the mountain can be replaced by a poem, as he once wrote, maybe a little of the sea and the street can be, too—not to erase them, but to meet them with a music we ourselves make.

More - 

A documentary on Wallace Stevens:

A good lecture on Wallace Stevens: 

Lovely picks. Here are concise notes plus full texts (all public-domain) for each.

Anecdote of the Jar 

A tiny parable about art’s power to impose order: a plain jar “takes dominion” over a “slovenly wilderness,” raising questions about whether culture clarifies or colonizes nature. Stevens keeps the diction bare—“gray and bare”—so the form enacts the idea. Many readers hear echoes of modernism’s cool confidence (and its limits): once the jar arrives, everything rearranges itself around it, yet the jar “did not give of bird or bush.” Control isn’t the same as life.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Sunday Morning 

A meditation that begins with “coffee and oranges” and opens into the big argument of Harmonium: can earthly beauty and mortal joy suffice without Christian transcendence? Across eight cantos, Stevens contrasts churchly “ancient sacrifice” with a pagan fidelity to the here-and-now—“Death is the mother of beauty.” The poem’s music moves from lush description to metaphysical clarity, ending not in despair but in a luminous acceptance of a world “Unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable.”

I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths—
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness—
She makes the willows shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new-plucked pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.

VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn.
Their boisterous devotion to the sun—
Not as a god, but as a god might be—
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 

A prism of 13 tiny visions, each tilting the world a degree. The blackbird becomes a device for seeing how perception makes reality—sometimes comic (“O thin men of Haddam”), sometimes crystalline (“I was of three minds”). Its spare lines and musical pauses (that famous “or just after”) show Stevens testing how much meaning can live in minimal images. The result is both playful and philosophical: a manual for attention.

Text
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.