I start the new year, looking both back and forward, honoring memories of the past and intention for the future, even as I stand firmly in the present.
This poem by Robert Bly is a reminder.
A POEM IS SOME REMEMBERING by Robert Bly
It's morning; there's lamplight, and the room is still.
All night as we slept, memory flowed
Onto the brain shore. Memories rise and fall
And leave behind a delicate openness to death.
Almost a longing to die. That longing
Is like rain on canyon ground, only droplets.
And the brain is like brown sand, it stretches
On and on, and it absorbs the rain.
What is a poem? "Oh it is some remembering,"
A woman said to me. "Thousands of years ago,
When I stood by a grave, a woman handed
Me a small bone made red with ochre.
"It was a poem about heaven, and I wept so."