Caterpillar Song

The Caterpillar Of Phalaena Pini.

Caterpillar Song

Summer and leaves filled me

With a green drowse, now full

Of sleep I must turn

Leaflike, the fine thread

Comes from my lower lip

And fastens to a leaf, I am

Weaving around my fullness

A closing, a slow shuttling

To touch there and there

Where I will dream

All my hearts withering

And changing to a half-remembered

One in the air who quivers

Among leaves, who will know

Night after night by this

Night I spin around us how

Already it stirs

From sleep inside me, gathers

The leaves I have left

In me, how we begin

Together, it grows huge eyes

For me, and we wait

Behind them, it is growing

Shut wings, we wait between them

Night by night after this

Night spun around us, we know

Now is the time to soften

The way ahead for us, it opens,

The wet, shut wings come slowly

Out, they open, the veins

Fill them, they harden

And belong to us, we see

The night with all our eyes

At once, we move our wings

Apart among leaves, the one

Leaf with eyes to open

The night, not falling now

But rising and flying.

David Wagoner

"There where I will dream." How often do we imagine what it's like to wrap up in a chrysalis and change into a moth? To think of being like a caterpillar, feeding on green, growing, "changing to a half-remembered one" (as if there's a seed of something within, something I once was meant to be, and something from my future drawing me), spinning the Night around me. How the caterpillar feeds on leaves, and in time becomes a leaf-like creature, but one "rising and flying" rather than falling and dying. And the element of night? The unknown, hidden world only dimly grasped, where patterns weave us, in our sleep, in our dreams, into something new.

"Shut wings, we wait between them."

And what will we become?

 

In Praise of Hands

Unknown

In Praise of Hands

The heart may falter but the hand goes on.

Wiser than heartbreak, the cool, eyeless hand

Makes bread, makes mortar, lays the cornerstone,

Tills the slow-answering land.

At eight o'clock the mothers plait and part

Their daughters' hair. The factory whistles rise,

The streets grow vocal. Here, bewildered heart,

Your evident answer lies.

Yesterday dwindles while tomorrow grows.

Today is ours - importunate and soon.

Quick, hands! To work! How fast the morning goes.

The whistles blow for noon.

Jessica Nelson North


"The heart may falter but the hand goes on." I wonder if this is parallel to what the caterpillar does. Weaving a garment, constructing a hibernating-house, a renewal chamber - moving unthinkingly according to some instinct or habit or body-knowledge. Sometimes, in deep grief or shock or confusion/fear, the body acts of itself. The feet bring us to old places, the hands lift and move, perform intricate tasks that we watch as if from a great distance. The body continues forward while the mind is motionless. Hidden and still, though surrounded by bustle, by noise and commotion. What is this state? It's not quite paralysis, it's not quite numbness - what is it? And at some point, the bewildered heart comes to, recognizes the passing time, and joins the hands at their work.








 

Entirely

Mary Fedden

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
and falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city's
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice



MacNeice’s  poem suits my current train of thought well. We want answers. We want to know why and how and who. We think this plus that equals such-and-such.Everything must or should be knowable, understandable, comprehensible. We think the "information" we have is correct, we believe if we know the "facts" we will be strong, we will be better, we can be prepared for things to come. But all that is illusion. We are truly in "a mad weir of tigerish waters, a prism of delight and pain". And it's okay. It is wildly reductive to think that we know much of anything, or understand what the "facts" mean. Learning to ask questions, new questions, recurring questions, questions within questions - this is the way to live. There is grace in exploration, in searching, in waiting for things to become clearer, clear enough for deeper quests. MacNeice writes so eloquently of learning to accept the partiality of our existence. It's a relinquishment of ego, it seems to me, a recognition of aweful compexities that are yet and may always be beyond us. Knowing we don't know is a good thing, it is much easier to learn from that position than from the position of believing we have the answers.