Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997)
British-American poet.
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'.
The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.
Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
To me it seems perhaps
Kropotkin understood half
of what we need to know,
and Lenin perhaps
knew half, and true revolution ... true revolution
must put these two halves together?
And I
in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.
Let Ariel learn
a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew from the lotus
open upon the waters.
Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
To serve the people,
one must write for the ideal reader. Only for the ideal reader.
And who or what is that ideal reader? God. One must imagine,
One must deeply imagine
The poet
never must lose despair.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.
I am not joking. I'm speaking
of spirit. Not dogma but spirit. The Way.
I was the first to see him, for I grew
out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed. . .
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber...
And not till he saw the angel had left him,
alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what he had still to do,
not till then did he recognize
this was no dream.
pure dust that is all
in all. Bless,
weightless Spirit. Drink
Caliban, push your tongue
heavy into the calyx.
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.