“I speak to my Lord though I am dust and ashes,”
A Handful of Ashes the wind will soon send flying
Into the drifted oak-leaves under the hedge.
No gardener ever rakes there
Only the squirrels gather bedding there
When they stack up their rustling nests.
You have granted me more time
On earth than the squirrels, less time than the Oak,
Whose secret takes a hundred years to tell.
Out of the acorn in the dirt
Its wooden sticks come up
Already knowing how to grow their leaves
And when to spend them all,
Knowing exactly
How to thread up into a winter sky
A dark-veined map like that of a great river
Spun out in tapering streams,
Twig by twig ascending and unfolding
Until at night its topmost buds
Enter the country of the stars.
By day
The squirrels run like script along its boughs
And write their lives with their light bodies.
They are afraid of us
We can never hold them
And there's no room for us in their invisible ark,
our home is warring disobedient history.
--Anne Porter (1911-2011) American Roman Catholic poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment