In a Dark Time - Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is-- Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Notes: Music of words, bloody music of words!
Big Book Of Poetry
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Earth Moving
What I love is always being born.
What I love is beginning always. ~ Elytis
I shall fill the ditch, which is my heart, with this clay of words
So that these lines will clutch at the ankles of someone passing over after the rains.
So that that this someone, who is passing over, will fall into the clay,
of which my heart is made of.
So that some one, moved thus from air to earth, will stay put, send down roots,
And become a tree arising out of me.
Notes: They are moving earth outside these windows this morning. I am reading poems, and doing so likewise.
My Poems
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Few Lines Before Evening Sitting
After I finish inking down
The evening silence into these
Three or four barred stanzas –
I don’t know which yet,
I shall sit in half lotus, turn off The lamp shining on this page, On this word, on this silence, And close my eyes to watch
The casual to and fro drift Of thoughts, just as I am doing Right now in this line, which may Next turn to consider the weight of my
Loneliness or that distant woman’s ache, Which I want to press into my chest, Where this morning, shaving, I saw Few flecks of white. How the body
Records what the mind forgets; The gurgle of time, the rustle of Breath, both which will flow on, After this poem gets forgotten, After daylight outside flails and fades.
Typist Notes: Even though I am one of the heathen (or in German "heiden") Bach refers to in one of his Sacred Cantatas that is currently playing, this is still some of most divine music ever written - the Western Cannon's response to Carnatic's Thyagaraja Keerthis, even though the theology is a little screwed up. Also thanks to Herr Jesu (Zorba's echo: and the Devil too!) for the fantastic music collection Dekalb Public Library offers free, to the saved and the heathen alike. Also growing up Illayaraja's "How To Name It" was a tape I played repeatedly. I still have that fifteen year old tape with me. Only now I see how much of Bach was brought over by Illu into Indian film music via, as KKK was fond of pointing out, classical ragas!!
My Poems
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