Sometimes- times like now- when things are unsettled and divided all around or sometimes just when I see changes in the landscape, or turn to the wrong radio station or think about the war and the fact that Americans have become torturers, or hear the voice of just about anyone within the current administration, I can feel so damned alienated from this land of ours and it seems like it will never feel like home again. But then there are the little things, different for all of us I'm sure, for me it happens for me when by chance I hear certain songs- Simon and Garfunkle's "America", for one-or when I catch the scent of the Atlantic ocean on the fog, or go to a big city and watch all the different people going about their business and, then, unexpectedly, I will feel a rush of gratitude and good fortune for being here, in the U.S., a thankfulness for the past and for the future, for the possibilities and dreams that may be battered but not yet relinquished. There's something about this poem that kindles that feeling. Despite the conceit of its Eurocentric premise, the words are just so powerful and so beautiful that I think it speaks to everyone here on this soil, all of us whose lives are the stories that shape our land, a place not yet done becoming.
The Gift Outright
- Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Skopelos and Virgin
-by Skorda
when first you see it
across the water,
rising round and new above the mountain.
Open your mouth and swallow
while youth holds its roundness near,
and you are running fearless in the dark.
Hold it inside, it is still warm
and you will need its light,
there, inside you.
Down the road of time, somewhere
after you’ve aged, traveled,
Explored, discovered.
And the dust around your doorway
has been pounded hard and smooth under your feet.
When you find yourself growing weary and bored,
when your eyes see only ruins,
and your heart is empty.
You may believe, in your exhaustion,
that this is truth, at last.
That the mystery has unraveled,
leaving no wilderness to explore or tame.
All secrets have been shared,
the frontier has dissolved.
Know then, with these thoughts,
you have been swallowed.
The warm belly of the beast
comforts with confining darkness
and lulls with rhythmic sounds
Murmuring to you,
Curl up and sleep,
just go to sleep.
Shake your head,
stretch your legs,
do not sleep now.
Remember what you know.
You swallowed the moon,
you hold it inside you.
Not as a magpie hoarding shiny things,
or wearing the moon for beauty
or bartering the moon for wealth.
You swallowed the moon for this moment.
When you will walk to the water’s edge,
open your mouth, release the moon
and let its light build you a pathway
across the wine dark sea.
©Skorda 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
homeland
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