Unfamiliar birds
In the mist unfamiliar birds are flying –
snowy plovers, grebes and murres and pelicans.
Waves pound in in exciting new ways
curling over from left to right, covering
large reaches of sand on the eleventh
try, filling the empty beach with foam
and pulling the unwary back to shatter
in the ocean’s merciless joy of movement.
In the news an unexpected president
is chosen and bland American newsmen
hide their fears, or present approval
for a new day, “Do you see prejudice there?
I see it differently. This is a vote for the party
not for the man, for the man but not for the faults.”
Not that I believe, but what can you do? Like
the last and best leader, open the gate
and welcome the new to the job you hope
he’ll try to live up to. If there’s no hope
we’ll smash against the rocks, but hope,
until the last great crash. Turn toward our strange fate.
While the door is open a poet leaves. Listen
to the withdrawing roar. As in a dream or an opera
we are left in the room with the monsters,
but overhead there is still the beautiful music,
the strange lyrics talking of sex and God, heard
from an indistinct everywhere, claiming life.
While we were passing years in what seemed small
ways the waves came in, until the eleventh,
that swept in and filled the shore, pulled us back
into the universal, lit the corridor ahead, a hall
of light and dark and haunting music. But here
we are standing on a cliff, eroded, firm, a rock,
and we are still here. We are here, to live
the rest, a candle not yet quite extinguished.
In the mist unfamiliar birds are flying –
snowy plovers, grebes and murres and pelicans.
Waves pound in in exciting new ways
curling over from left to right, covering
large reaches of sand on the eleventh
try, filling the empty beach with foam
and pulling the unwary back to shatter
in the ocean’s merciless joy of movement.
In the news an unexpected president
is chosen and bland American newsmen
hide their fears, or present approval
for a new day, “Do you see prejudice there?
I see it differently. This is a vote for the party
not for the man, for the man but not for the faults.”
Not that I believe, but what can you do? Like
the last and best leader, open the gate
and welcome the new to the job you hope
he’ll try to live up to. If there’s no hope
we’ll smash against the rocks, but hope,
until the last great crash. Turn toward our strange fate.
While the door is open a poet leaves. Listen
to the withdrawing roar. As in a dream or an opera
we are left in the room with the monsters,
but overhead there is still the beautiful music,
the strange lyrics talking of sex and God, heard
from an indistinct everywhere, claiming life.
While we were passing years in what seemed small
ways the waves came in, until the eleventh,
that swept in and filled the shore, pulled us back
into the universal, lit the corridor ahead, a hall
of light and dark and haunting music. But here
we are standing on a cliff, eroded, firm, a rock,
and we are still here. We are here, to live
the rest, a candle not yet quite extinguished.