Dear diary/column: I recently got the first of my dental fillings done this week, and I have to say, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, although my wallet is approximately $200 lighter… Anyways, here are some more poems that I found that soothed my soul (and my gums)!

A Center

Ha Jin (1956-) 

You must hold your quiet center, where you do what only you can do. If others call you a maniac or a fool, just let them wag their tongues. If some praise your perseverance, don’t feel too happy about it— only solitude is a lasting friend. You must hold your distant center. Don’t move even if earth and heaven quake.

If others think you are insignificant, that’s because you haven’t held on long enough.

As long as you stay put year after year, eventually you will find a world beginning to revolve around you.

Holidays

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) 

The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling over flows;— The happy days unclouded to their close; The sudden joys that out of darkness start As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!

White as the gleam of a receding sail, White as a cloud that floats and fades in air, White as the whitest lily on a stream, These tender memories are;— a Fairy Tale Of some enchanted land we know not where, But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

To be of use 

Marge Piercy (1936-) 

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Andrea Gutierrez is the managing editor of the Bryan County News.