Sometimes I think I will stop breathing, as I wait for the great poets and poetesses to come to startle the silent air with the distant thunder of their cloud-borne cries. Read a masterpiece called Night Travels by clicking on the title. The passage below is its closing—I save for you its opening and its majestic flow, majestic as all that is secret is. A good poem turns everything and everyone in its path into poetry. This is that kind of poem.
I feel how flow the tower, and the ground;and overhead and round, how space is moveless flight;
I feel a singing made of silent sound;
I feel how holy darkness close pursues the holy light.
I will stay here tonight, and then move on.
I will not see the tower in the sun,
I know, for daylight is for labor – that
is what it means to be a man, in part,
for man goes forth unto his work
until the evening light, the time when visions come.
And yet what is man’s labor, if his mind
is bent, or if his back is bent? The same:
it is a vanity, a nothingness
with an appearance much like what exists.
It is a training for the coming night
when labor’s at an end, and all that man
can do is hardly manage to confess
the gift of his own being, if he can.
Blind I gaze. A silver sliver bands the night,
at length, far in the East. The long horizon wakes.
I searched in vain for an image that even vaguely suggests the timbre of this poem, and I crave your indulgence, poetess and readers, for I couldn't help myself, and offer the best I could find.
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