Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.
Dawn Revisited, Rita Dove
You wake amid bursts of darkness
you come back from the vast sleep that holds you
tighter than my arms, each evening
I bare myself and abandon you
to the night’s tall grasses.
The hours that create us
separate us, and I give you up
until dawn comes to dissolve absence.From “Hearts, Books of Love” [“You wake amid bursts of darkness”], Hélène Dorion, Translated from the French by Susanna Lang
it is the hard
edge of things
i am avoiding
the separations
so that i can take my glasses off
and then i cannot tell
which are the leaves
and which the angels
like blake
like that man
who lived with the lepers
not noticing what was sin
and what was grace
visioning visions vision
i take my glasses off
so i can see
i take my glasses off, Lucille Clifton
in the dream of foxes
there is a field
and a procession of women
clean as good children
no hollow in the world
surrounded by dogs
no fur clumped bloody
on the ground
only a lovely line
of honest women stepping
without fear or guilt or shame
safe through the generous fields.
a dream of foxes, Lucille Clifton
One night I wandered alone from my comrades’ huts;
The grasshoppers chirped softly
In the warm misty evening;
Bracken fronds beckoned from the darkness
With exquisite frail green fingers;
The tree gods muttered affectionately about me,
And from the distance came the grumble of a kindly train.
I was so happy to be alone,
So full of love for the great speechless earth,
That I could have laid my cheek in the wet grasses
And caressed with my lips the hard sinewy body
Of Earth, the cherishing mistress of bitter lovers.
A Moment's Interlude, Richard Aldington
In that great journey of the stars through space
About the mighty, all-directing Sun,
The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one
Companion of the Earth. Her tender face,
Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race,
Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun,
Shines ever on her lover as they run
And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.
Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise,
Down from her beaten path she softly slips,
And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes,
Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips.
While far and near the men our world call wise
See only that the Sun is in eclipse.
A Solar Eclipse, Ella Wheeler Wilcox
It is the smallest idea born in the interior will,
that has no fury nor ignorance,
no intruder but stranger, no scaffold of a plea,
no mote of the hungry, no pitchfork of instinct,
no ladder of pity, no carriage of lust,
no wavering foot on concrete, no parish of bees,
no mountains of coal, no limestone and ash,
no lie poured down the stairs of a house among them,
and this is the will of maker and offspring,
no boot in the hallway indicating more exit
than arrival, more straying than strategy, no more struggle
than contained in my body now, as I wander the rooms,
tearing curtains apart from their windows
separating material from light.
Infinite and Plausible, Tina Chang
Earthquake Magnitude 7.4 – 5 km S of San José del Palmar, Colombia. Servicio Geológico Colombiano.
El volcán Puracé, also, erupted.
Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
Going There, Jack Gilbert