Let us forget awhile—or may
We not drift into yesterday
And play?—
Forget for a moment years
Crowded with shuddering fears,
With tears?
Lift high your hands again, and try
To be a thrush, to touch the sky,
To fly.
Dance down a sunbeam ray, bright
Like the day tossed from the night
To light.
Laugh to the flowers, that you
Colored the sunshine anew
With dew.
Whisper to me youth was so—
You too remember and know—
Then go.
Watch the dewdrops in the morning,
Shake their little diamond heads,
Sparkling, flashing, ever moving,
From their silent little beds.
See the grass! Each blade is brightened,
Roots are strengthened by their stay;
Like the dewdrops, let us scatter
Gems of love along the way.
I have gone the long way round
With half the world between.
I have come the long way back again,
And things that I have seen
Ripple behind me, lost and lost,
And only this is clear:
I who have been away from you
Am home again, am here.
They have said that love is light—
Yes, everywhere I went;
And I was wiser than the rest,
And they were discontent.
But little you have to answer me,
And I no more to say
Till I shall be coming back to you
Again the long way.
Such lovely things along the wind may blow—
The delicately fretted flakes of snow,
The tiny jewels of sand, and golden leaves;
Thin snow-white curved plum-petals in the spring,
And slow vermilion poppies in the fall.
Perhaps a gray bird through white rain is blown,
Or ashes, sifting over quiet stone
If you find your true voice, bring it to
the land of the dead. There is kindness
in the ashes. And terror in non-identity.
A little girl lost in a ruined house,
this fortress of my poems.
I write with the blind malice of children
pelting a madwoman, like a crow,
with stones. No—I don’t write:
I open a breach in the dusk
so the dead can send
messages through.
What is this job of writing? To steer by
mirror-light in darkness. To imagine
a place known only to me. To sing
of distances, to hear the living notes
of painted birds on Christmas trees.
My nakedness bathed you in light.
You pressed against my body
to drive away the great
black frost of night.
My words demand the silence
of a wasteland.
Some of them have hands that grip
my heart the moment they’re written.
Some words are doomed like lilacs
in a storm. And some are like the
precious dead—even if I still prefer
to all of them the words for the
doll of a sad little girl.
I would rather grind my teeth to powder,
I would rather tread barefoot on thin, sharp stones,
I would rather let the blood of my veins freeze to red ice,
And the muscles of my legs stiffen to cold stone,
Than be drawn by the warm breath
Of transient things.
I would rather—
But… yet…
I am being drawn… I am being drawn…
Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing;
I look far out into the pregnant night,
Where I can hear a solemn booming gun
And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.
My tearful eyes my soul’s deep hurt are glassing;
For I would hail and check that ship of ships.
I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,
My voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips,
And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.
O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing,
O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!
Is there no hope for me? Is there no way
That I may sight and check that speeding bark
Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?
Ask me no more of the full flower’s speech,
Tell me no more of the ripe fruit’s need,
For I am tired of trying to reach the fruit in the seed.
Leave me awhile, and I will recover
In darkness and night.
It was too soon for me to discover growth in the light.
Bear with my weakness, my failure, my pain,
Grant me this—only this darkness I need.
I sicken from sunlight, but give me the rain, for I am but seed.
Traveler, your footprints
are the path, and nothing more;
Traveler, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
By walking, you make the path,
and when you look back
You see the trail that you will
never walk again.
Traveler, there is no path,
only wake trails on the sea.
You smile perhaps when I write “Spring” to you,
Who know so well my window but reveals
A space of factory walls, and smoke-soiled blue—
That square of sky above. But here one feels
April in March, and prescience of the May.
Spring’s not a matter just of birds or trees;
It’s something subtler, unheard, unseen—a way
Joy surges up in every face one sees.
Shut me from sky or light, I’m sure I’d know
The day that Spring first breathed across the snow,
Even as now I sense it everywhere
And find my window’s grimy picture fair.
Compassion Camp 