Anenome

Unknown

Anenome

In the meadow the anemone

is creaking open to the dawn.

By noon, the sky’s polyphony

will flood her white lap till she drowns.

The tiny muscle in her star

is tensed to open to the All,

yet the daylight’s blast so deafens her

she barely heeds the sunset’s call

or finds the willpower to refurl

her petal-edges – her, the power

and will of how many other worlds.

In our violence, we outlive her.

But which new life will see us flower

and face the skies, as true receivers?

Rilke

“The sky’s polyphony.” I had to look that up to make sure I had it right. Polyphony = ‘the style of simultaneously combining a number of parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonizing with each other”. So does that make the anenome like an open ear? Is she listening to the music of the spheres? Rilke calls her a star, so that makes her an earth-star receiving messages from a sky-star. And though delicate, she takes everything in, something we “in our violence” don’t do though we outlive her. The thing that speaks to me most is the question whether we also can flower and become “true receivers.” It's against our nature to receive. We want to act, accomplish, conquer – hence our “violence”. But the anenome shows us that a life of beauty, though breathtakingly short and fragile, is in fully opening ourselves, listening, and receiving. Can we do it? Rilke doesn’t know.

 

Silent Noon

Thompson/Ford

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,—

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—

So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,

This close-companioned inarticulate hour

When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin

(To find just the right illustration/photo/painting – almost impossible! I have loved this poem for so long, it’s frustrating not to pair it the way I want to. However! This poem.) This poem is about as close to perfection as  you can get.  When you read something and it’s like second nature, like a second skin, an articulation of your experience – it’s magic. I read this poem and it could be me. I have done this, been here, thought this, and yet – Rossetti wrote it. How can it be? He lived nearly 200 years ago. A world and time away. The difference between my world and the world of the person walking down the sidewalk toward me is spectacular enough – Rossetti? And yet here we are – occupying the same moment, the same place, the same mind. I just shake my head. “This close-companioned inarticulate hour/When twofold silence was the the song of love.” So help me, I hear these words in person – I mean, as if Rossetti were speaking to us, reaching his hand across the years, calling us his close-companions. If there is anything beneficial about poetry (!) this is right up there, this connecting of minds and lives, this, yes, I will say it at the risk of sounding maudlin, love.

Poetry Searches For Radiance

unknown

Poetry Searches for Radiance

Poetry searches for radiance,
poetry is the kingly road
that leads us farthest.
We seek radiance in a gray hour,
at noon or in the chimneys of the dawn,
even on a bus, in November,
while an old priest nods beside us.

The waiter in a Chinese restaurant bursts into tears
and no one can think why.
Who knows, this may also be a quest,
like that moment at the seashore,
when a predatory ship appeared on the horizon
and stopped short, held still for a long while.
And also moments of deep joy

and countless moments of anxiety.
Let me see, I ask.
Let me persist, I say.
A cold rain falls at night.
In the streets and avenues of my city
quiet darkness is hard at work.
Poetry searches for radiance.

Adam Zagajewski

"We seek radiance in a gray hour." I know that to be true. And underneath it lies this hope - "Let me see, I ask. Let me persist, I say." I love that. Maybe that's what the poet is doing, doggedly working toward hope, toward light, in spite of everything working against him.