In my column today I simply give two poems which I love and especially recall at a time when the world is awry – the pandemic unrelenting and tenacious and climate change unstoppably undermining all foundations – without those in authority seeming to know what to do or take decisive action as they interminably squabble.
● In a Dark Time
By Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
● Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Well, there is hope still. Perhaps indeed in these dark times our eyes will begin to see the truths that will save us. And certainly we can do nothing else but seek out what is still remarkable and good in the world and give praise.
And in a far corner of my memory, there is a little couplet by the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Petri which tells us that even in the worst circumstances we must be thankful for small mercies:
To be said over and over again
I glance down at my shoe, and there’s the lace!
This can’t be jail then, can it, in that case.
