Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)
American poet who published several volumes of poetry characterized by their rhythm and natural imagery.
To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.
A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,
The burning lake turns into a forest pool,
The fire subsides into rings of water,
A sunlit silence.
Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:
Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.
Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still called;
The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;
And love, love sang toward.
The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will —
The right thing happens to the happy man.
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
Bless me and the maze I'm in!
Hello, thingy spirit.
I lived with deep roots once:
Have I forgotten their ways —
The gradual embrace
Of lichen around stones?
The light comes brighter from the east; the caw
Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.
Yet for this we travelled
With hope, and not alone,
In the country of ourselves,
In a country of bright stone.