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The Night Migrations
by Louise Glück
This is the moment
when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds' night migrations. It grieves me to think the dead won't see them-- these things we depend on, they disappear. What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won't need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine. |
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from DEFINITIONS OF POETRY by Carl Sandburg
12. Poetry is a fossil
rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.
13. Poetry is an exhibit of one
pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one
seen.
14. Poetry is a sky dark with a
wild-duck migration.
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As
darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as
that day sixty million years ago when this migration began. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, p.3
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from The
Encyclopedia of the Stones:
a Pastoral James Richardson
a Pastoral James Richardson
1
They do not believe in the transmigration of souls.
They say their bodies will move
as leaves through light.
Everything would be perfect if the atoms
were the right shape and did not fall down.
They do not believe in the transmigration of souls.
They say their bodies will move
as leaves through light.
Everything would be perfect if the atoms
were the right shape and did not fall down.