mystery of the verb - anne hebert

In a quiet country we received the passion of the world, naked sword laid on our two hands

Our heart had never known the light when that first was confided to us, and its glimmer deepened the shadow of our features

It was before all weakness, charity was alone
Preceding fear and shame.

It invented the universe in primal justice and we shared this vocation in the great vitality of our love.

Light and death within us received right of asylum, looked at each other with blind eyes, touched each other with careful hands.

Arrows of odour reached us, uniting us to the earth like wounds at a wedding marked by its excesses

O seasons, rivers, alders and ferns, leaves, flowers, wet wood, blue grasses, all our riches bleed their fragrance, animal musk beside us

Colours and sounds visited us in numbers and by small stunning groups, while the dream doubled our spell as the storm hems in the blue of an innocent eye

Joy set to crying out, a new mother smelling of game-birds among the reeds. Spring delivered was so fair that it took our hearts with one hand

The three strokes of the world's creation sounded in our ears and grew like the beating of our blood

In a single dizziness the instant was. Its flash passed over our face and we received a mission of fire and burning.

Silence, nothing moves or speaks, the world is founded, and lifts our hearts, seizes the world in a single stormy gesture, has us clinging to its dawn like the skin to fruit

All the quick earth, the forest on our right, the deep city to our left, right in the world's centre, we advance to the world's tip

Foreheads with curls where silence turns to stale musky shocks of hair, every grimace, aged faces, children's cheeks, loves, wrinkles, joys, mournings, creatures, creatures, tongues of fire at the earth's solstice

O my darkest brothers, all feasts engraved in secret; human breasts, musician gourds where captive voices rage

Let him who has received the function of the world take you in charge like an extra, shadowed heart, too full of shadows, never relent until the dead and living are justified in one single song among the dawns and grasses

Hebert, Anne. "Mystery of the Verb" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 58-9.

april is national poetry month!

as per the last few years, i will be posting a poem a day in honour of national poetry month (in both canada and the united states). 

there's no theme this year, other than that i think these are each beautiful or moving. 

feel free to make other suggestions or to share your responses/ reactions/ resonances.

a birthday poem for my wife

let's assume one foundational fact:
i love you. let's also assume
some other facts: know that you are
adored, appreciated, valued, cherished.

vocabulary sometimes fails me,
as i sometimes fail you in word & deed,
needing to place them in their right order --

visualizing their effect, how they might fill your heart with
light & hope & joy; how they change & yet remain.
in spite of it all -- my fumblings & oh, so feeble attempts,
earnest & well-intentioned, of varying success --
there is still this one incontrovertible fact: i love you.

(from twentieth century) - john ash

(from Twentieth Century)

A decadent historicism appeared in buildings, appalling to purists,
and executives of telephone companies walked daily
beneath romanesque vaults and the gilded wings of statues,

then on a clouded day no one could fix in retrospect
the body became a religion, sex a kind of makeshift sacrament,
and with nothing but this dim polestar to guide us

we must now confront the idea of continual mourning
and the necessity of pain, as a friend's handsome face
is reduced to something resembling a bruised skull.

It is a time of marvels: in midsummer a wind out of nowhere
strips the trees bare; every few minutes another Marsyas is flayed,
and the small uncomprehending dog laps at his blood.

Twentieth century, we still have much to learn from you
concerning the refinements of cruelty and its multiplication,
banal as shopping malls on the outskirts of a town,
flourishing as the centre dies and is boarded up.

Twentieth century, you are leaving us
with resurrections of dead gods who remain dead,
twitching in their galvanised graveclothes, and this is unkind,
since we have stayed faithful to you as if you were a good mother.

We ignored your cocaine habit and your masochism -
you appearing in the Irish bar saying, when we mentioned
your face swollen like a purple cabbage: 'Oh I had a bad fall.'

What kind of staircase could do that?
Tell us whose fist it was. Twentieth century, don't lie to us.
We love you and you are leaving forever.

Ash, John. "(from Twentieth Century)" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 400-1.

a valentine's day poem for my wife

lately (and again) i've been amazed at my luck
in having you walk this road with me
side by side, skin on skin (such soft skin)
and hand in hand. there is more

value in that first 'yes' than anyone could have guessed
(and i would not have believed them)
no known way to determine, weigh, calculate,

verify its worth. i hold it too
lightly at times; too tightly at others.
i cannot grasp the depths you hold, mine those riches,
even though i claim to know you more intimately
than others. my gift. my mystery. my love.