darkness

Now A Darkness is Coming
by Jane Hirshfield

I hold my life with two hands.
I walk with two legs.
Two ears are enough to hear Bach with.
Blinded in one eye, a person sees with the other.
Now a great darkness is coming.
A both-eyes darkness.
I have one mouth.
It holds two words.
Yes, No,
inside all others.
Yes. No. No. Yes.
I say yes to these words, as I must,
and I also refuse them.
My two legs,
shaped to go forward,
obedient to can’t-know and must-be,
walk into the time that is coming.

“Now A Darkness is Coming” from LEDGER: Poems by Jane Hirshfield. Published 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

 

on DH Lawrence:
Lawrence’s books include The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was his last novel. The story of an aristocratic lady and her working-class lover, the book contained a multitude of sex scenes and unprintable four-letter words. The first edition was published privately in Italy (1928) and an edited version appeared in Britain in 1932. The unexpurgated version wasn’t published in the United Kingdom until 1960 and promptly came under attack. At the obscenity trial, the attorney for the prosecution famously asked the jury, “Is it a book you would have lying around? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”
Novelist E.M. Forster was called as a witness for the defense in the British trial. His good friend Lawrence had died a long time before, in 1930, of tuberculosis in Vence, France. Forster called Lawrence “the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation.”
Lawrence’s ashes are interred in a small chapel in what is now the D.H. Lawrence Ranch in New Mexico. He said, “If there weren’t so many lies in the world, I wouldn’t write at all.”
And, “The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.”

 

Definition #232 The Hundred Names of Love

The Hundred Names of Love

The Hundred Names of Love

by Annie Lighthart

The children have gone to bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the forgiveness of that sleep.

Then the one small cry:
one strike of the match-head of sound:
one child’s voice:
and the hundred names of love are lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.

One hundred nights we wake like this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one.

“The Hundred Names of Love” by Annie Lighthart from Iron String © Airlie Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

Riddle#21 Darkness

Still the darkness sings its song:
Slow, gentle, silhouettes
Etch to dusk, coil o’er eyelids
Shadowed feasts; weathered fetes.

This poem is a response to a prompt from David Harrison:
http://davidlharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/new-challenge-from-j-patrick-lewis/#comment-16430

My Holy Spirit (2)

Owl symbolizes wisdom. Holy Spirit brings wisdom to help us examine our lives; shows us past denial and self deception. He conforms us to the image of God’s son.

Your wisdom-eyes pierce the darkness of the night;
Inner light speeds vision through the trees and haze.
Your gizzard guides you in the storm, the winds
Make way for victory-guardian’s flighted maze.

Inner light speeds vision through the trees and haze:
You hear our cries, our pleas for mercy, sight,
The holy view, You knew, in Christ Your Son.

Your gizzard guides you in the storm, the winds
A rally-call, a tumult-spin, a war to win:
Protector’s wide spread wings!

Make way for victory-guardian’s flighted maze:
A guiding bird, watchful gaze, prophet
Of holiness! sanctifier-spirit!