Not-Yet

Gabriele Münter

Not-Yet

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out of the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch –
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

Jane Hirshfield

This theme keeps coming up. I don’t know if I’m making that happen, or if there’s just a lot of poems out there about this and I’ve just happened upon a glut of them? ("What if This Road, by Sheenagh Pugh, "Otherwise", by Jane Kenyon, "Sometimes", by Sheenagh Pugh looks at it from the positive side, and there might even be more, further back in blog-time.) It's something I want to hear over and over anyway. I want equilibrium. It's balance I'm looking for. Something between being thankful for what is, knowing it could be 'otherwise', knowing things can and will change, like in "What if This Road", and that those changes will increase in difficulty, but also seeing this as a challenge and an opportunity for good things - as Sheenagh Pugh does in "Sometimes".  I love the back-and-forth between all these poems. But there's something not being said - a poem I'll need to add. What is my reason for feeling hope, for knowing good will come? After all, this is not a tightrope I walk, it's a thread I follow. Not the god of Not-Yet, but the I Am, the I Never Change, and I Make All Things New.

A Hand

Henry Moore

A Hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,

not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow,

not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines

with their infinite dramas,

nor what it has written,

not on the page,

not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,

not rotor pin’s smoothness,

not ink.

The maple’s green hands do not cup

the proliferant rain.

What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

 Jane Hirshfield

The thing about poetry that keeps pulling me back in must be that need to look beyond the surface. It isn't just the thing, it's what it signifies, it's the levels of meaning within and around it. This poem is a perfect example of that.