FRAGMENTS AND REFLECTIONS

                                            From David Whyte's poem 

                                                  "Sweet Darkness" 

                                                           *  *  *

                                         You must learn one thing.

                                         The world was made to be free in.

                                         Give up all the other worlds

                                         except the one to which you belong.

                                         Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

                                         confinement of your aloneness

                                         to learn

                                         anything or anyone

                                         that does not bring you alive

                                         is too small for you.

                                           Raymond Carver's poem

                                                 "Late Fragment"

                                   And did you get what 

                                   you wanted from this life, even so?

                                   I did.

                                   And what did you want?

                                   To call myself beloved, to feel myself

                                   beloved on earth.

                                            From Mary Oliver's poem

                                              "When Death Comes"

                                                         *  *  *

                          When it is over, I want to say: all my life

                          I was a bride married to amazement.

                          I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms..

                          When it's over, I don't want to wonder

                          if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

                          I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 

                          or full of argument.

                          I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Sources:  David Whyte's poem, "Sweet Darkness," is from The House of Belonging (1997), by David Whyte.  Mary Oliver's poem, "When Death Comes," is from New and Selected Poems (1992), by Mary Oliver.  Raymond Carver's poem, "Last Fragment," is from A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), by Raymond Carver. The Whyte and Oliver poems are also reproduced in a small anthology titled Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation (2003), edited by Roger Housden.