Matthew 5:13 | King James Bible

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

from Stories of God | Rainer Maria Rilke

To make myself understand and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud, too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.

After the Meeting, a Red Fox | Lisa Russ Spaar

If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced
I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath
dusk’s blossom bock, ink-musk ale
at rusted window screen, the annual carnival
a neon embolism blurring the horizon’s black seam
that from the brine of my dispirits
struck me as the portajohn & ticket-littered
portal of hypocrisy and the soul’s mojo shutting down.
Then you, scrabble in the bamboo,
fluent rapacious pelt, burnt, elegant-booted streak
flecking the despond no longer just mine
with a shiver estival that –  even as language cages
it now, a loping scriptural and starving –
every word of it I winged to you then a barbarous traveling.

O Anchor | Matthew Nienow

Dark charms the anchor in its house

of water, and what type of bottom
does it drag, for what type of work, for you,

with your need to stay in roughly the same place

for a night, with your questions of how
much to let out

and how well your windlass works

and how you feel sometimes hauling
200 foot of chain by hand in the dark,

wondering what in your life sent you

here, where the world exists as much
below you as above, where you are

as much the chain as the chain.

Blue Skies | Joseph Pielichaty

- | Johannes Bobrowski

Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls.

Schneckenhaus (1567) | Hans Lencker