Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Tag Archives: poem
“Door in the Mountain” – Jean Valentine
Never ran this hard through the valley
never ate so many stars
I was carrying a dead deer
tied on to my neck and shoulders
deer legs hanging in front of me
heavy on my chest
People are not wanting
to let me in
Door in the mountain
let me in
“Those Winter Sundays” – Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
“River” – Shuntaro Tanikawa
Mother,
Why is the river laughing?
Why, because the sun is tickling the river.
Mother,
Why is the river singing?
Because the skylark praised the river’s voice.
Mother,
Why is the river cold?
It remembers being once loved by the snow.
Mother,
How old is the river?
It’s the same age as the forever young springtime.
Mother,
Why does the river never rest?
Well, you see it’s because the mother sea
is waiting for the river to come home.
Translated from the Japanese by Harold Wright.
“From Nowhere” – Marie Howe
I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling
no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes
unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring. Listen,
a day comes, when you say what all winter
I’ve been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes
where ice had seemed solid, scattering ducks
and scaring us half to death. In Vermont, you dreamed
from the crown of a hill and across a ravine
you saw lights so familiar they might have been ours
shining back from the future.
And waking, you walked there, to the real place,
and when you saw only trees, come back bleak
with a foreknowledge we have both come to believe in.
But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,
and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds
with the wooden spoon, I remembered,
this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety
or of fruitfulness? We walk with mincing steps within
a thaw as slow as February, wading through currents
that surprise us with their sudden warmth. Remember,
last week you woke still whistling for a bird
that had miraculously escaped its cage, and look, today,
a swallow has come to settle behind this rented rain gutter,
gripping a twig twice his size in his beak, staggering
under its weight, so delicately, so precariously it seems
from here, holding all he knows of hope in his mouth.
Excerpt from Clearing – Wendell Berry
From History:
What we eat is resurrection
of what we have eaten.
The flesh we had is changed
beyond any words we knew
into this unity we are:
woman, man, and earth,
each other’s metaphor.
I say this while the age
achieves its ruin, rain
falling hard in the night
into the swollen river,
a rage of lies in the air.
This weather is not spent.
But we have healed together
earth and eye and hand.
That is our sacrament.
What Mary Oliver Said
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
“The Mountain” – Emily Dickinson
The mountain sat upon the plain
In his eternal chair,
His observation omnifold,
His inquest everywhere.
The seasons prayed around his knees,
Like children ’round a Sire:
Grandfather of the days is he,
Of dawn the ancestor.
“Night Text” – Sarah Maclay
NIGHT TEXT
Let’s imagine I’m translating something to you–
you, asleep, or sleepless and naming
that third place–between–
with the tips of your tapering fingers–
I don’t know the language.
It bends.
In the mind–in that strangely shared chamber–
that is, I mean, in your hands,
where you show me those scenes of confusion and flight
with such intimacy, and don’t know it–
even sans color, sans liquor, sans shape,
we are twins. Fraternal. Unknown.
The moon, invasive, huge,
lunging in through the windows,
makes no exceptions–
It’s true: it will never happen / you’d be surprised.
Insomnia – Linda Pastan
I remember when my body
was a friend,
when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.
The door to the future
had not started to shut,
and lying on my back
between cold sheets
did not feel
like a rehearsal.
Now what light is left
comes up—a stain in the east,
and sleep, reluctant
as a busy doctor,
gives me a little
of its time.
from The Virginia Quarterly Review
