The Continuous Life
What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes,
brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost- a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that
might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
….Mark Strand
we feel it in our bones, memories of ancient ties and the unfolding lilt of time….gentle and terrifying in its passing…..what we desire is to hold on to the stars, to the leaves in their falling….to become something as beautiful as the night sky….
may you lean into the dark and feel held
My Empty Cages
Longing for dazzling skies
in forests, wild and deep-
brightly hued birds of the aviary
give in to restless need. Opening
bars, a release as subtle as a sigh-
the steady rhythm
of sun-tipped feathers glide up
and away, flecks in the clouds.
I keep on feeding,
slogging, and cleaning,
unlocking those bubbled cages
one by one, humming
freedom in their wings- lift your bones!
Each exotic neck, papery like origami tissue
preens and tucks seamlessly
under willowy, distant tree tops.
After the emptying, the air, winged and colored
no more, shifts in silence. Without the mimicking
rhymes and morning song, shame settles
like down. I sulk behind their bars,
sweeping up my loss. Adrift in a dream,
visceral and delicate, I ache with hunger
for the powerful drumming of wings
and the graceful confetti of my birds.
…….In Blue
The poem is a beautiful reflection on the words of Mark Strand… The wind longs to play with our hair … when all the winged ones have left the sky, nature – our nature – misses the waves and the ripples they make, the color of the wind that the heart knows how to see… Yes, we make of life a chore, yet it only longs for itself, and gives us everything we ever need, why do we pretend to always want more, to be our own souls undoing?
the heart always knows, but we have contradictory desires…….we long for freedom, yet it’s right here…..we cage our hearts…..I suppose that deep longing we feel teaches us what beauty really means…..Piero Ferruci in his book ‘Beauty and the Soul’ says..’When we surrender to beauty, when we let ourselves be dazzled and transported by it, we experience relief, and we grow, since growth occurs only when we have the courage to abandon whatever in us is stale and obsolete. We will know the world is bigger than we thought.’ To me, this is one of our finer goals in life….the work of poets and seekers to keep from being undone…..keep writing g.f.s……
beautiful!
With gratitude and a wish for bedazzled skies in your day…..
This is a beautiful poem – I love the uplifting freedom of the birds as they fly from their cages; and the poignancy of those last few lines is just lovely. ~ Julie xoxox
Thank you Julie…..so glad it brings a little nuance to your day…wishing you well….