Thursday, October 17, 2024

 

The Envoy (by Jane Hirshfield)

 

One day in that room, a small rat.

Two days later, a snake.

 

Who, seeing me enter,

whipped the long stripe of his

body under the bed,

then curled like a docile house-pet.

 

I don’t know how either came or left.

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

 

For a year I watched

as something—terror? happiness? grief?—

entered and then left my body.

 

Not knowing how it came in,

Not knowing how it went out.

 

It hung where words could not reach it.

It slept where light could not go.

Its scent was neither snake nor rat,

neither sensualist nor ascetic.

 

There are openings in our lives

of which we know nothing.

 

Through them

the belled herds travel at will,

long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.


 

 

Saturday, October 12, 2024

𝗜 𝗦𝗮𝘄 𝗛𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 (by Marge Piercy)


Nothing moves in a straight line,

But in arcs, epicycles, spirals and gyres.

Nothing living grows in cubes, cones, or rhomboids,

But we take a little here and we give a little there,

And the wind blows right through us,

And blows the apples off the tree, and hangs a red kite suddenly there,

And a fox comes to bite the apples curiously,

And we change.

Or we die

And then change.

It is many as raindrops.

It is one as rain.

And we eat it, and it eats us.

And fullness is never,

And now.


 

 


The journey of an illegal migrant.