Those cold November nights, so long ago,
My family would walk outside to hear
My family would walk outside to hear
The wild geese calling softly overhead—
Unseen formations in the black,
transparent air.
And, guessing at origins and
destinations,
My elders would conjecture how
The geese knew when to go, and
where . . . then stay
To name faint constellations: the Great
Bear,
And slant Orion’s Belt and fire-tipped Bow,
And Cassiopeia’s tilted starry Chair.
I didn’t know, back then, as now I do,
There was, there is, no husbandry in
heaven.
Their lights are all on, but nobody’s
home.
These days I turn to you, who wouldn’t
know
The North Star from red Mars or Venus
trembling near the moon—
Whose deep interior constellations I
can’t see,
But know are there—And you are always
home.
You are home.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_stars_berlin.png
http://eros-porn.tumblr.com/ for 25 June 2014 from http://chiyomatsu.tumblr.com/post/89853811948
http://rainbowcoloredsouth.blogspot.com/2014/01/good-night-sweet-dreams_2.html?zx=25dda803072296df
2 comments:
Best Poem Ever
This poem is written mostly in iambic pentameter, with a few shorter lines and a few longer ones too. I wanted to write it in a free verse that was almost not verse--rather like much purely syllabic (not quantitative) verse--but the poem would not let me. It would not come out as other than metrical, mostly pentameter. In fact, I wrote pentameter versions of all of the other lines, but decided not to publish them--a kind of tit-for-tat aimed at the poem itself. Sometimes poems have a life and a will of their own, demonstrating the power of the unconscious archetypes/complexes.
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