A Grain of Mustard Seed (3 page)

We hardly noticed the faint smell of blight,

Stuffed with new cars, ice cream, rich images.

But no grass grew on the raw images.

Corruption mushroomed from decaying bones.

Joy disappeared. The creature of the blight

Rose in the cities, dark smothered eyes.

Our children danced with rage in their shoes,

Grew up to question who had murdered God,

While we evaded their too attentive eyes,

Walked the pavane of death in our new shoes,

Sweated with anguish and remembered God.

4

The Time of Burning

For a long time we shall have only to listen,

Not argue or defend, but listen to each other.

Let curses fall without intercession,

Let those fires burn we have tried to smother.

What we have pushed aside and tried to bury

Lives with a staggering thrust we cannot parry.

We have to reckon with Kali for better or worse,

The angry tongue that lashes us with flame

As long-held hope turns bitter and men curse,

“Burn, baby, burn” in the goddess’ name.

We are asked to bear it, to take in the whole,

The long indifferent beating down of soul.

It is the time of burning, hate exposed.

We shall have to live with only Kali near.

She comes in her fury, early or late, disposed

To tantrums we have earned and must endure.

We have to listen to the harsh undertow

To reach the place where Kali can bestow.

But she must have her dreadful empire first

Until the prisons of the mind are broken free

And every suffering center at its worst

Can be appealed to her dark mystery.

She comes to purge the altars in her way,

And at her altar we shall have to pray.

It is a place of skulls, a deathly place

Where we confront our violence and feel,

Before that broken and self-ravaged face,

The murderers we are, brought here to kneel.

5

It is time for the invocation:

Kali, be with us.

Violence, destruction, receive our homage.

Help us to bring darkness into the light,

To lift out the pain, the anger,

Where it can be seen for what it is—

The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.

Put the wild hunger where it belongs,

Within the act of creation,

Crude power that forges a balance

Between hate and love.

Help us to be the always hopeful

Gardeners of the spirit

Who know that without darkness

Nothing comes to birth

As without light

Nothing flowers.

Bear the roots in mind,

You, the dark one, Kali,

Awesome power.

After the Tiger

We have been struck by a lightning force

And roaring like beasts we have been caught

Exulting, bloody, glad to destroy and curse.

The tiger, violence, takes the human throat,

Glad of the blood, glad of the lust

In this jungle of action without will,

Where we can tear down what we hate at last.

That tiger strength—oh it is beautiful!

There is no effort. It is all success.

It feels like a glorious creation.

An absolute, it knows no more or less,

Cannot be worked at, is nothing but sensation.

That is its awful power, so like release

The animal within us roars its joy.

What other god could give us this wild peace

As we run out, tumultuous to destroy?

But when the tiger goes, we are alone,

Sleeping the madness off until some dawn

When human eyes wake, huge and forlorn,

To meet the human face that has been torn.

Who was a tiger once is weak and small,

And terribly unfit for all he has to do.

Lifting a single stone up from the rubble

Takes all his strength. And he hurts too.

Who is a friend here, who an enemy?

Each face he meets is the same savaged face

Recovering itself and marked by mystery.

There is no power left in this sad place—

Only the light of dawn and its cold shadow.

How place a cool hand on some burning head?

Even compassion is still dazed and raw.

The simplest gesture grates a way toward need.

After the violence peace does not rise

Like a forgiving sun to wash all clean,

Nor does it rush out like some fresh surmise

Without a thought for what the wars have been.

“I too am torn” or “Where is your hurt?”

The answer may be only silences.

The ghostly tiger lives on in the heart.

Wounds sometimes do not heal for centuries.

So the peace-maker must dig wells and build

Small shelters stone by stone, often afraid;

Must live with a long patience not to yield.

Only destruction wields a lightning blade.

After the tiger we become frail and human,

The dust of ruins acrid in the throat.

Oh brothers, take it as an absolution

That we must work so slowly toward hope!

“We’ll To The Woods No More,
The Laurels Are Cut Down”

(
At Kent State
)

The war games are over,

The laurels all cut down.

We’ll to the woods no more

With live ammunition

To murder our own children

Because they hated war.

The war games are over.

How many times in pain

We were given a choice—

“Sick of the violence”

(Oh passionate human voice!)—

But buried it again.

The war games are over.

Virile, each stood alone—

John, Robert, Martin Luther.

Still we invoke the gun,

Still make a choice for murder,

Bury the dead again.

The war games are over,

And all the laurel’s gone.

Dead warrior, dead lover,

Was the war lost or won?

What say you, blasted head?

No answer from the dead.

Night Watch

1

Sweet night nursing a neighbor—

The old lady lifts her hands

And writes a message

On the air—

Gently I lay them down.

Sudden motion

Might shift the bandage

Over one eye.

Across the hall

A woman moans twice.

I alone am not in pain,

Wide-awake under a circle of light.

Two days ago in Kentucky

I was the sick child,

Sick for this patchy, barren earth,

For tart talk,

Dissatisfaction,

Sharp bitter laughter,

Sick for a granite pillow.

Among that grass soft as silk,

Those courtesies, those evasions,

I was sick as a trout

In a stagnant pond.

Wide-awake,

I weigh one thing against another.

The old lady will see

Better than before;

The woman who moaned

Sleeps herself whole again.

Sweet, innocent night

In the hospital

Where wounds can be healed!

2

The birds sing

Before dawn,

And before dawn

I begin to see a little.

I hold the old warm hand in mine

To keep it from clawing

The bandage,

And to comfort me.

I am happy as a mother

Whose good baby sleeps.

In Kentucky

They are spurned mothers,

Curse the children

And their hot black eyes,

Hard from not weeping;

Remember the old days,

Dear pickaninnies,

Mouths pink as watermelon.

What happens

When the baby screams,

Batters the barred cage of its bed,

Wears patience thin?

What happens

When the baby is six feet tall,

Throws stones,

Breaks windows?

What happens

When the grown man

Beats out against us

His own hard core,

Wants to hurt?

In the white night

At the hospital

I listened hard.

I weighed one thing

Against another.

I heard, “Love, love.”

(Love them to death?)

And at dawn I heard a voice,

“If you love them,

Let them grow.”

3

The convalescent

Is quick to weak rage

Or tears;

In a state of growth

We are in pain,

Violent, hard to live with.

Our wounds ache.

We curse rather than bless.

4

“I hate them,” she said.

“They spoil everything,” said

The woman from Baltimore.

“It is not the dear old town

I used to know.”

I felt pain like an assault,

The old pain again

When the world thrusts itself inside,

When we have to take in the outside,

When we have to decide

To be crazy-human with hope

Or just plain crazy

With fear.

(The drunken Black in the subway

Will rape you, white woman,

Because you had bad dreams.)

Stomach pain, or vomit it.

In Kentucky I threw up

One whole night.

Get rid of this great sick baby

We carry around

Or go through the birth-sweat again.

Lazy heart,

Slow self-indulgent beat,

Take the sick world in.

5

In Baltimore

The Black who drove me to the airport

Seemed an enormous, touchable

Blessing.

“When you give a speech,” he told me,

“And you get that scared feeling,

Take a deep breath. It helps.”

Comfort flowed out from him.

He talked about pain

In terms of healing.

Of Baltimore, that great hospital

Where the wounds fester

Among azaleas and dogwood,

The lovely quiet gardens,

“We are making things happen,”

Said the black man.

“It is going to be beautiful.”

He had no doubt.

Wide awake in the hospital

In the morning light,

I weighed one thing against the other.

I took a deep breath.

Part Two

Proteus

They were intense people, given to migraine,

Outbursts of arrogance, self-pity, or wild joy,

Affected by the weather like a weathervane,

Hungry for glory, exhausted by each day,

Humble at night and filled with self-distrust.

Time burned their heels. They ran because they must—

Sparkled, spilled over in the stress of living.

Oh, they were fickle, fluid, sometimes cruel,

Who still imagined they were always giving;

And the mind burned experience like fuel,

So they were sovereign losers, clumsy winners,

And read the saints, and knew themselves as sinners.

Wild blood subdued, it was pure form they blest.

Their sunlit landscapes were painted across pain.

They dreamed of peaceful gardens and of rest—

And now their joys, their joys alone remain.

Transparent, smiling, like calm gods to us,

Their names are Mozart, Rilke—Proteus.

A Last Word

(
for my students at Wellesley College
)

Whatever we found in that room was not easy,

But harder and harder, and for me as well,

Fumbling for words when what we fumbled for

Could not be spoken, the crude source itself;

The clever people had no news to tell.

The best failed. That is the way it is.

The best knew what we were mining after

Was not to be reached or counted in an hour.

The worst poems, maybe, became fertile,

And we knew moments of pure crazy laughter.

Often you came into that room becalmed,

Your faces buttoned against the afternoon.

If the hour occasionally opened into trees,

If we digressed, leaving the subject flat,

Well, we were fighting hard against the gloom.

The vivid battle brought us within the hour

Out of the doldrums together, edged and warm.

At any instant the fall of a mask

Released some naked wisdom; an open face

Surprised itself and took our world by storm.

For you, I trust, the time was never wasted;

For me, driven to dig deep under my cover,

Into the unsafe places where poets operate,

There is no grief; too much was taken and given,

More than administrators can discover.

And so you go your ways, and I go mine,

Yours into the world at last, and mine away—

To some adventure on another planet.

Whatever failed or you still hoped to do

Will grow to harvest in some other way,

Not against the stream of a college, but

Toward an ordering of the spirit in pure air

Where no one is bound by custom, or so engined

Toward immediate goals, and trapped by time:

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

And when the angel comes, you will remember

Our fierce encounter, beyond devious ways,

Not at the end of some blank corridor—

Outside all walls, the daring spirit’s wrench

To open up a simple world of praise!

Girl With ’Cello

There had been no such music here until

A girl came in from falling dark and snow