Gary Snyder

With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.

Having a place means that you know what a place means... what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense... Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness.

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love

In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.

The old time people here in warm
earth lodges thirty feet across
burned pitchy pinewood slivers for
their candles,
snow after snow for all those
centuries before—
lodgefire light and pitchy slivers
burning—

don’t need much light for stories in

the night.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

Sundown, Timber Gap

—sat down—

dark firs.

dirty; cold;

too tired to talk

The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.

the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow

this is our body.

As we hoe the field
let sweet potato grow.
And as sit us all down when we may
To consider the Dharma
bring with a flower and a glimmer.
Let us all sleep in peace together.

I hold the most archaic values on earth... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World “What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.”

Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World www.themarginalian.org/2025/01/31/g...

waking half-drunk in a strange pad
making it out to the cool gray
san francisco dawn –
white gulls over white houses,
fog down the bay,
tamalpais a fresh green hill in the new sun,
driving across the bridge in a beat old car
to work.