|
More
Poetry
Let Evening Come
Jane Kenyon
Let the light
of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
A
Marriage
Robert Creely
The first retainer
he gave to her
was a golden
wedding ring.
The second—late at night
he woke up,
leaned over on an elbow,
and kissed her.
The third and the last —
he died with
and gave up loving
and lived with her.
Back to top
As difference blends into identity
Josephine Miles
As difference
blends into identity
Or blurs into obliteration, we give
To zero our position at the center
Withdraw our belief and baggage.
As rhyme at the walls lapses, at frontiers
Customs scatter like a flight of snow,
And boundaries moonlike draw us out, our opponents
Join us, we are their refuge.
As barriers between us melt, I may treat you
Unkindly as myself, I may forget
Your name as my own. Then enters
Our anonymous assailant.
As assonance by impulse burgeons
And that quaver shakes us by which we are spent,
We may move to consume another with us,
Stir into parity another's cyphers.
Then when our sniper steps to a window
In the brain, starts shooting, and we fall surprised,
Of what we know not do we seek forgiveness
From ourselves, for ourselves?
Back to top
In a Dark Time
Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins
to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady stream of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is "I"?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Back
to top
From East Coker (in the Four Quartets)
by
T.S. Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and
wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
....
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
Back
to top
From
Little Gidding (in the Four Quartets)
T.S. Eliot
We shall not cease from
exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Back
to top
I
ask the impossible
I ask the impossible: love me
forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single-mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
And all that you hold sacred, advise you
Against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to your mob tires you
Love me: and from job to home again.
Love me when you’re bored
When every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
Or more pathetic, love me as you always have:
Not as admirer or judge, but with
The compassion you save for yourself
In your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,
The anticipation of your death,
Mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood Memory
And if there is none to recall
Imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever
And I will make the impossible
A simple act,
By loving you, loving you as I do.
Ana Castillo, 2000
THE
MAN WATCHING
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
-- Rilke
Back
to top |
Why
it's different