Thursday, January 28, 2021

Thursday Poem - It Used to Be


It used to be the shine of streetlights
on a rain-wet street was winter
and summer was outdoors and most of the time.
A season's slant of light noticed only
in August on the golden knolls, the hint
of ending, to love that well. . . The moon
was full and half and full and gone again
just as it pleased. Mostly the wind blew sweet
in off the Bay, but not the rare,
dry, bare north wind, the earthquake wind.
Sea fog, dear fog, came drifting in the Golden Gate
sometime in the afternoon and in the year
and was everywhere a while, the garden dripped
in a grey hush, then it was all gone.

I am wise to the seasons now. I foretell an altered light,
observe the Solstice and the Equinox,
am eased by the majestic order. I am old.
Yet still when fog from the river rises
silent and unforeseen, and the bright morning is all gone
into the uncreated, I rejoice.

Ursula L. Le Guin from So Far, So Good

2 comments:

Belle said...

This is beautiful! I live in San Francisco (and grew up in the Bay), and she managed to perfectly capture the spirit of the fog and the weather in just a few lines :)

Mystic Meandering said...

When I looked out my kitchen window last night and saw the "almost" full moon shining down, I remembered that while everything around us here on earth is changing, our health, our way of life, our livelihoods for many, and our sanity, still - the symphony of creation continues: earth keeps on turning, the moon goes through its cycles; the natural cycles go on... As Ursula said - I was "eased by the majestic order" - if only for a moment.