Life in Stone

The night is also a sun.

And for many a year thou might have seen the sun, on its rising, incline away from their cave on the right, and, on its setting, turn aside from them on the left, while they lived on in that spacious chamber.
---Q:18:17

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever,
both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space
---C. Milosz

From Celia:

Here's a poem for you, too, Billo. Anna, of course - first, last and always:

Yet somewhere life is simple, after all,
A light to warm and cheer and glisten
A neighbour there at dusk across the wall
Chats with a girl, with only trees to listen
To this, the tenderest talk of all.

The life we lead is decorous and wearing,
Our bitter trysts impend, like rites to preach,
While with its gusts a harebrained wind is tearing
The clauses off a scarcely started speech.

For nothing, though, are we prepared to lose
Our granite city great with fame and woes,
Its spreading rivers with their crystal floes,
Its gloomy gardens dusky green repose,
All those half-heard accents of the muse.

Beneath the chill roof of my empty lair
I count not the days that are hollow,
The Apostles letters I study there,
The words of the Psalmodist I follow.

But blue are the stars, the frost all lace;
New marvels each tryst heaps on,-
In the Book a red maple leaf marks the place
Of the High Song of Solomon.

Anna Akhmatova. From White Flock. 1915.

10:49 AM