Every night I am watching
For the fireflies to wake up
Across the hollow and river
Where they winter along a bluff.
Every day I am waiting
For the dripping in the eaves,
The lengthening of twilight,
The greening of the leaves.
But as I watch and wait here,
The radiator purrs;
The owl hoots a warning;
The bobcat slyly stirs.
The waiting makes them sweeter –
Both the winter and the spring.
The one fills up with longing;
The other, with everything.
There is nothing holy
About any particular night
Unless you fill it
With song and silence,
Old stories told again,
Foods long remembered,
Perhaps a warming drink,
And a few good companions,
Family or otherwise,
Who have come through the bad times,
And the good times, to be here now.
There is nothing sacred
But what is made sacred
By the diligent effort
Of imperfect men,
And nothing is saved
From the fire of the ages
Except the endless moment
In which we briefly live.
Because after every disappointment,
Every heartache,
The world remains.
The world is innocent,
Vast as anything,
Utterly merciless,
Unfathomably good.
In it we find everything
We want or need;
In us it finds only meaning,
Its only meaning,
Its very heart.
We love and are loved,
But above all we are driven,
Drawn to the wheel
Where all labors are spent.
Stars wheel above us,
Too many to dream;
We toil beneath them,
Knowing nothing
But why.
As I walk in the sun
Over the slow-flowing Rhine,
My mind is on things not said, not done;
People I’ve let down, who let me down -
The great, growing weight of neglected things.
Strasbourg itself is in no hurry.
It has been dreaming here for centuries -
Cathedral-crowned, canal-streaked, solid;
A place for major gods and minor kings.
One man is not large enough to breathe deeply.
Only a city can do it - late at night,
When no one is around,
Inhaling the sweat, the sadness, of millions,
The living and the dead,
Exhaling its own pure thoughts.
There is a flame inside you
That never quite goes out -
Though sometimes it burns low,
Low and smoking,
Singeing the core of you
With bladelike heat;
And blowing on it may not help,
Any more than hoping
It flares up of its own accord;
And you may feel that nothing will help,
And for a moment or two
You may be right.
Then something changes.
You take a walk, or a new song plays,
And suddenly the old fire wakes,
Fierce again, young,
Leaping like a waterfall,
And all the dull dross of existence
Is fed to the furnace
Of your blazing heart.
I kept on walking, he said,
Until I was no longer in the cold.
How did you find your way? they asked.
I kept on walking, he said.
How did you keep up hope? they asked.
I kept on walking, he said.
You must be very brave, they said.
And very strong.
You must be a kind of hero.
No, he said.
I am no kind of hero.
It is only
That I kept on walking.
The trouble with growing up
In idyllic New England
Is tending to forget
What a paradise it is.
The old barns and the deep woods,
The seasons painted on oak trees,
The held breath of winter
And the brief burst of spring –
All this can be commonplace,
As boring as apples,
When you’re weaned on maple,
Fed by the leaping deer;
It may take a lifetime
To see it like a stranger,
For whom the spidering frost
Is a jewel as rare as gold.
