Heraclitus on Rivers

Joseph Benwell Clark, Self Portrait

Heraclitus on Rivers

Nobody steps into the same river twice.
The same river is never the same
Because that is the nature of water.
Similarly your changing metabolism
Means that you are no longer you.
The cells die, and the precise
Configuration of the heavenly bodies
When she told you she loved you
Will not come again in this lifetime.
You will tell me that you have executed
A monument more lasting than bronze;
But even bronze is perishable.
Your best poem, you know the one I mean,
The very language in which the poem
Was written, and the idea of language,
All these things will pass away in time.

Derek Mahon


"You are no longer you." This poem poses one of the profound questions of life. What makes us who we are? And if we are constantly changing within our cells and metabolism, and our language and ideas and relationships are changing too - how can we know who we are? What statement can we possibly make that will continue to be true throughout time? And what remains when everything has changed? I can't think of many deeper questions than these. The poem is a breath of fresh air to me, as if Mahon opened a window in a dead-air room and let in the wind. Finally, someone not pretending to be okay, someone not in thrall to the illusion of "knowing oneself". 
  

 

Listen

Diana Ashdown.

Listen

Listen, I have flown through darkness towards joy,

I have put the mossy stones away from me,

and the thorns, the thistles, the brambles.

I have swum upward like a fish

through the black wet earth, the ancient roots

which insanely fight with each other

in a grave which creates a treasure house

of light upward-springing leaves.

Such joy, such joy! Such airy drama

the clouds compose in the heavens,

such interchange of comedies,

disguises, rhymes, denouements.

I had not believed that the stony heads

would change to actors and actresses,

and that the grooved armour of statues

would rise and walk away

into a resurrection of villages,

townspeople, citizens, dead exiles,

who sing with the salt in their mouths,

winged nightingales of brine.

Iain Crichton Smith

This is one of those poems like “The Conflict” by C.Day Lewis, or “Thalassa” by Louis MacNeice and several others that I’ve posted, in which the speaker clearly sees the difficulty and struggle in their circumstances and nonetheless chooses to work toward hope. The poem talks about swimming upward through the soil like a fish, but I have this picture in my mind of a seed sprout pushing its way toward the surface as well. The images are wonderful – the statues walking, the “resurrection of villages” – and the description of life as such an “interchange of comedies, disguises, rhymes, denouements”, so true. Can we too, fly birdlike, swim fishlike, (or reach flower or treelike) toward joy, toward light and hope? Is it possible to believe that the darkness is where we start? That this is where joy is rooted?