Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997)
British-American poet.
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
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.
Let Ariel learn
a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew from the lotus
open upon the waters.
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.
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?
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.
I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'.
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.