Working on the poetry section of my January class, came across this poem by Li-Young Lee. What miracles poets are. I just had to share. It's from his collection called Book of My Nights.
Our River Now
Say night is a house you inherit,
and in the room in which you hear the sea
declare its countless and successive deaths,
tolling the dimensions of your dying,
you close your eyes and dream
the king's bees build the king's honey
in the furthest reaches of your childhood.
Wouldn't you set your clocks
by that harvest?
And didn't you, a sleepless child
saying to yourself the name
your parents gave you over and over,
hear both the ringing sum of you
such sound accounted for
and all the rest, the dumb
throng of you, that never answered to a word,
that stands even now assembled where
your calling brinks, the unutterable
luring your voice out of its place of rocks
and into a multitude of waters?
But what was it I meant to say?
Something about our beginningless past.
Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud,
folds story and forgetting.
Li-Young Lee. Our River Now. Book of My Nights.
