Poetry For Sleep || Ep. 25: The Grounded Sleep Podcast

Welcome to the Grounded Sleep Podcast! You don't have to do anything except get into bed, close your eyes, and allow David to guide you into a deep, peaceful rest. Enjoy letting go of the day, quieting all the mental noise, and going back to that primordial place of stillness that is calling you back.

Transcript

Alright,

It's bedtime again.

Hey friend,

Welcome back to the Grounded Sleep Podcast.

I'm David.

I'll be your guide tonight.

But we've also got a guest guide with us.

I'm going to be reading the poetry of Robert Frost.

That's right.

One of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost is,

The only way around is through.

And if you want to get to tomorrow morning,

The way through is you getting a really good night's rest.

So let's do that.

When you're ready,

You can close your eyes.

Hopefully you're in your pajamas,

You're in bed,

You've brushed your teeth,

You've combed your hair,

You've put on your pimple cream,

Whatever you had to do.

If you sleep in a helmet,

That's fine.

Like a teddy bear squeezing a pillow,

Whatever you need.

I'm not judging.

Well,

Maybe just a little.

Just kidding.

So with a light smile on your face,

Gratitude in your heart,

Go ahead and let yourself start to drift off into sleep while I read to you.

Let gravity pull you down into your bed and let the dark night help you get some really needed deep rest.

And I'm going to start with a poem called Pod of the Milkweed by Robert Frost.

Calling all butterflies of every race from source unknown,

But from no special place.

They ever will return to all their lives,

Because unlike the bees,

They have no hives.

The milkweed brings up to my very door the theme of wanton waste in peace and war.

As it has never been to me before,

And so it seems of flowers coming out that should if not be talked then sung about.

The countless wings that from the infinite make such a noiseless tumult over it.

To no doubt with their color compensate for what the drab weed lacks of the ornate.

For drab it is,

Its fondest must admit,

And yes,

Although it is a flower that flows with milk and honey,

It is bitter milk as anyone who ever broke its stem and dared to taste the wound a little knows.

It tastes as if and might be opiate,

Or whatsoever else it may secrete.

Its flowers distilled honey is so sweet.

It makes the butterflies intemperate.

There's no slumber in its juice for them.

One knocks another off from where he clings.

They knocked the dye stuff off each other's wings.

With thirst on hunger to the point of lust,

They raise in their intemperance a cloud.

A mingled butterfly and flower dust that hangs perceptibly above the scene.

In being sweet to these ephemerals,

The sober weed has managed to contrive.

And our three hundred days and sixty-five,

One day too sweet for beings to survive.

Honey shall come away as struggle worn and spent and dusted off of their regalia,

To which at daybreak they were freshly born,

As after one of them's proverbial failure,

From having beaten all day long in vain and against the wrong side of a window pane.

The waste of the essence of the scheme and all the good they did for man and God,

To all those flowers they passionately trod,

Was leave as their posterity one pot.

With an inheritance of restless dream,

He hangs on upside down with a talon feet,

In an inquisitive position odd as any Guatemalan parakeet.

Something eludes him.

Is it food to eat or some dim secret of the good of waste?

He almost has it in his talon clutch,

Where they have the flowers and butterflies all gone.

That science may have stocked the future on.

He seems to say the reason why so much should come to nothing must be fairly faced.

Away.

Now,

I out walking,

The world desert,

And my shoe and my stocking do me no hurt.

I leave behind good friends in town,

Let them get well-wined and go lie down.

Don't think I leave for the outer dark,

Like Adam and Eve put out of the park.

Forget the myth,

There is no one I,

Am put out with or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong,

I but obey,

The urge of a song I am bound away.

And I may return,

If dissatisfied with what I learned from having died.

A brook in the city.

The farmhouse lingers,

Though averse to square,

With the new city street it has to wear.

A number in,

But what about the brook that held the house as an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook,

Its strength and impulse,

Having dipped a finger length,

And made it leap my knuckle having tossed,

A flower to try its currents where they were crossed.

The meadow grass could be cemented down from growing under pavements of a town.

The apple trees be sent to the heart-stone flame.

Use waterwood to serve a brook the same.

How elves dispose of an immortal force,

No longer needed,

Staunch it is at its source.

With cinder-loads dumped down,

The brook was thrown deep in a sewer-dungeon under stone.

Given darkness still to live and run,

And all for nothing it had ever done.

Except forget to go and fear,

Perhaps,

No one would know except for ancient maps.

That such a brook ran water,

But I wonder if it from being kept forever under.

The thoughts may not have risen that so to keep this new-built city from both work and sleep.

A boundless moment.

He halted in the wind and what was that,

Far in the maples,

Pale but not a ghost?

He stood there bringing March against his thought,

And yet too ready to believe the most.

Oh,

That's the paradise in bloom,

I said,

And truly it was fair enough for flowers,

Had we but in us to assume in March such white luxurance of May for hours.

We stood a moment so,

In a strange world,

Myself as one his own pretense deceives.

And then I said the truth and we moved on,

And a young beach clinging to its last year's leaves.

Evening in a sugar orchard.

From where I lingered in a lull in March,

Outside the sugar house,

One night for choice,

I called the fireman with a careful voice and bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch.

Oh,

Fireman,

Give the fire another stoke and send more sparks up the chimney with the smoke.

I thought a few might tangle as they did among the bare maple balls and in the rare hill atmosphere not cease to glow and to be added to the moon up there.

The moon,

Though slight,

Was moon enough to show.

On every tree a bucket with a lid and on black ground a bearskin rug of snow.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.

They were content to figure in the trees as Leo or Ryan in the Pleiades and that was what the bows were full of soon.

Gathering Leaves Spades take up leaves no better than spoons and bags full of leaves are light like balloons.

I make a great noise of rustling all day like rabbit and deer running away.

But the mountains I raise elude my embrace flowing over my arms and into my face.

I may load and unload again and again till I fill the whole shed and what have I then next to nothing for weight and since they grew duller from contact with earth next to nothing of color.

Next to nothing for use but a crop is a crop and who's to say where the harvest shall stop.

The Valley's Singing Day The sound of the closing outside door was all you made no sound in the grass with your footfall.

As far as you went from the door which was not far but you had awakened under the morning star the first songbird that awakened all the rest.

You could have slept but a moment more at best already determined dawn begin to lay in places across a cloud the slender ray.

You're prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight and losing the pent up music of overnight.

But dawn was not to begin their pearly pearly by which they mean the rain is pearls so early before it changes to diamonds in the sun.

Neither was song that day to be the self begun.

You had begun it and if there needed proof I was asleep still under the dripping roof.

My window curtain hung over the sill to wet but I should awake to confirm your story yet.

I should be willing to say and help you say the ones you had opened the Valley's Singing Day.

Reviews

Robert Frost!!!!

FANTASTIC ❣❣❣❣❣

Love your sense of humor and soothing voice Namaste

Thanks, David 💖 for a great sleep from your awesome meditation. I appreciate your guidance ❤️💖💕💖💕

Interesting…I listened to this one just after your reading of TS Eliot. Frost’s poems are so much easier to take in with their language and meaning that I did feel myself getting sleepy. Whereas it took so much concentration to follow and make meaning out of Eliot’s poem that I wasn’t even a little sleepy.

Soothing and peaceful❤️

Well david..these are great. I guess I’m going to have to get a membership

🙏🏻😴🙏🏻😴🙏🏻😴🙏🏻