Thursday, July 19, 2007

Thursday Poem - Sojourns in a Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal — then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
— but we have changed, a little.

Denise Levertov

3 comments:

Lil said...

Love it Cate! And you have inspired me to look further into poetry...I'm now deeply in-love with Mary Oliver!

Lil

Taexalia said...

Something for you over at my blog ;)

Andromeda Jazmon said...

She catches it exactly; that we are nature but feel apart from it, hobbled like a donkey, breaking free and then returning. I like this poem a lot. Your photo is great too!