In a Dark Time

             

         In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke

Theorica Thanatos

                   I have seen your grave,

             From the patterns in the pine

To the silken lining which will engulf your body,                              I have seen.

The stone used to mark your final resting place,

The moisture of the ground in which you remain,

                            I have felt.

           The stench you will leave within,

        The stages of your undevelopment,

                        I have known.

I have seen your cells break apart and decay.

I have known the brittleness of your fragile bones.

           And I have seen you forgotten,

      Buried beneath millions of years of life

                Continuing without you.

            And in looking at your face,

                   I have seen my own.