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levite · 06-26-2011, 11:24 PM

So I thought I might post a poem, and if anyone responded, perhaps I might post more.

I don't write a whole lot of poetry, although I enjoy writing it when that's the way the wind sits. This one was written to my wife, as part of making up from a quarrel.

The Northwest Passage

In storms of the mundane I’m lost, I try but cannot find you now.
In frost-locked squalls of daily grind, you’re muddled and can’t feel my hand,
or see the way to go with me,
and so around us it comes down: a maelstrom of minutiae
our creditors and balances within and sometimes due without
a wrack of places, dates, and now-we-musts, of expectations and of others’ doubts
a farrago of all the fears of the not quite so young or new,
the brilliant and the underused, who worry what they’ve brought they’ll lose.
We’re snowblind in the blizzard, then,
forget to breathe and now we’re panicking,
forget to stop before we go, and now we’re shocked our steps are faltering
forget to listen for the quiet and now sick our paths are vanishing;
and how the noise just snowballs,
‘til we’re running blind and deaf to all
the lines we cross, the signs we left, the signals back and forth we missed.

It’s in silences I find you best, the warm and curving stillnesses.
In calm of moments taken well you see me and know where I’m bound,
and it’s together we have always found, with surety of doubled breath,
a symphony of sacred time, the spark of synchronicity,
to see our path, to know our way, to find the hope for years and days
yet unarrived, a pair of lives no more or less
unbounden or unburdened with the troubles and the weights
that all fight off, or all take on, or all fall to, or all flee from;
but in those sun-becalming undulations of our moments of serenity,
I see you and you hear me, and in glad appreciation of the patience
and the perseverance of the pridefulness, refusing pain’s privations;
the unhurried sense of harmony that let us come together first
becomes our compass, and our spyglass, and our footing and our nerve.

Fair-weather friends are free to suffer fickle fate or flee,
but all is fair in love, we know, and for us there in unity’s no strength unless
it be a map, a chart, a jointly written rutter that shall route us from
the bitterest of winter’s parts and bring us to ourselves again:
for in our twoness when we’re one, our fear’s undone, and we
can learn to trust our way again and come through struggle’s cyclone swirl
to tranquil light upon the eye, the stillness of uniqueness that’s
a glance of what’s in you and I.

06-26-2011, 11:24 PM	#1 (permalink)
levite Minion of Joss Location: The Windy City	One or more poems (mine) So I thought I might post a poem, and if anyone responded, perhaps I might post more. I don't write a whole lot of poetry, although I enjoy writing it when that's the way the wind sits. This one was written to my wife, as part of making up from a quarrel. The Northwest Passage In storms of the mundane I’m lost, I try but cannot find you now. In frost-locked squalls of daily grind, you’re muddled and can’t feel my hand, or see the way to go with me, and so around us it comes down: a maelstrom of minutiae our creditors and balances within and sometimes due without a wrack of places, dates, and now-we-musts, of expectations and of others’ doubts a farrago of all the fears of the not quite so young or new, the brilliant and the underused, who worry what they’ve brought they’ll lose. We’re snowblind in the blizzard, then, forget to breathe and now we’re panicking, forget to stop before we go, and now we’re shocked our steps are faltering forget to listen for the quiet and now sick our paths are vanishing; and how the noise just snowballs, ‘til we’re running blind and deaf to all the lines we cross, the signs we left, the signals back and forth we missed. It’s in silences I find you best, the warm and curving stillnesses. In calm of moments taken well you see me and know where I’m bound, and it’s together we have always found, with surety of doubled breath, a symphony of sacred time, the spark of synchronicity, to see our path, to know our way, to find the hope for years and days yet unarrived, a pair of lives no more or less unbounden or unburdened with the troubles and the weights that all fight off, or all take on, or all fall to, or all flee from; but in those sun-becalming undulations of our moments of serenity, I see you and you hear me, and in glad appreciation of the patience and the perseverance of the pridefulness, refusing pain’s privations; the unhurried sense of harmony that let us come together first becomes our compass, and our spyglass, and our footing and our nerve. Fair-weather friends are free to suffer fickle fate or flee, but all is fair in love, we know, and for us there in unity’s no strength unless it be a map, a chart, a jointly written rutter that shall route us from the bitterest of winter’s parts and bring us to ourselves again: for in our twoness when we’re one, our fear’s undone, and we can learn to trust our way again and come through struggle’s cyclone swirl to tranquil light upon the eye, the stillness of uniqueness that’s a glance of what’s in you and I. __________________ Dull sublunary lovers love, Whose soul is sense, cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove That thing which elemented it. (From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)