Still the wood I knocked on
is the family tree. I’m not a god,
I haven’t the face for it.
Devotion is my disease,
or a way out. That accounts
for sons, and for everything.
Not so much “enough,”
there is more to be done,
yes, and to be done with.
You were the sun and moon.
Now darkness loves me;
the lights come on.
“… forgiveness is not something God does, it is who God is.” – Richard Rohr
How many thousands of divinity students
have dipped their bodies into the old night of your name.
What the girls waken to is you,
and when the young men dressed in silver weave
and flash in battle – that is also you.
The poets always met
in your long vaulted corridors.
And they were emperors of pure sound
and moving and deep and assured.
You are the delicate hour at nightfall
that makes all the poets equally good;
you crowd full of darkness into their mouths,
and every poet, sensing he has discovered greatness,
surrounds you with magnificent things.
A hundred thousand harps take you
like wings and sweep you up out of silence.
And your primitive wind is blowing
the fragrance of your marvelous power
to every being and to every creature in need.
Walt Whitman –
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
— Izumi Shikibu, from The Ink Dark Moon, trans. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani (Vintage Classics, 1990)
When at last we can love what we will not touch
Know what we need not be;
Hum over to ourselves the tune made by the massed instruments
As the shell hums the sea;
Then come the long days without the terrible hour,
And the long nights of rest,
Then the true fruit, from the exhausted flower
Sets, in the breast.
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. What I described in Another Life—about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened—is a frequent experience in a younger writer. I felt this sweetness of melancholy, of a sense of mortality, or rather of immortality, a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us. When that’s forceful in a young writer, it can make you cry. It’s just clear tears; it’s not grimacing or being contorted, it’s just a flow that happens. The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet. It may be repressed in some way, but I think we continue in all our lives to have that sense of melting, of the ‘I’ not being important. That is the ecstasy. It doesn’t happen as much when you get older. There’s that wonderful passage in [Thomas] Traherne where he talks about seeing the children as moving jewels until they learn the dirty devices of the world. It’s not that mystic. Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: ‘Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.’ That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature. I’ve always felt that sense of gratitude. I’ve never felt equal to it in terms of my writing, but I’ve never felt that I was ever less than that,” – Derek Walcott.
Edge of Atlantic 