Poetry and Essays
by Gene Barnes
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Spirit Level
The lake of our grief is very deep,
Sounding rods never reach the bottom. We try to skim the surface Like the little water-bugs, But grief has no surface tension. We must learn to swim in it, To go under without drowning, To move in the dark currents And feel the freezing of our bones. Listen to the sounds in your ears Where the fluid is still moving. Once we were fishes. Climbing into our bodies, We found the lakes of sorrow. If, within your own body, You find a body of dark water, Do not try to bridge over it Or portage around it. Seek your own level in it. Nothing will be displaced. |
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| Redthundercloud Redthundercloud is dead; He was the last living speaker of Catawba. Now there are not any singers of songs In the language of that Indian nation. There is no person who can speak the words anymore. They are all gone—like the great brown bears. What their eyes saw, our eyes will not ever see. What was theirs before their fathers were born Is lost now to their own sons and daughters. Not just a way of speaking, but a way of Vision. In the great house of every nation One sacred wall has fallen; One way of telling our own story lost. So many of the ways have been lost; Tracks covered by the snow. Among the few that we still have, Is there still the right one? |
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| The Night Is Always Welcome Because I’ve never been there, I can’t tell you much about it: For the door is seldom open, And they say the light is blinding, So our eyes are never ready For the moment in the garden Where the flowers bloom forever And the years are shed like petals In the soundlessness of dawn. But I’ve listened to blind strangers Whose words have greater meaning; Half afraid they may be truthful, Having neither doubt nor believing. Too many times the vision Burns the angel with the prophet— But the night is always welcome, Like a light that comes unbidden To disturb our quiet dreaming And reveal what we have hidden In the folded corners of our mind. |
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| Stonehenge Revisited Through these old stones the seasons run; This clock that stands apart, The sun and moon its moving parts, Far slower than the human heart. Its hands-- the shadows of the standing stones, Its face-- the English countryside. And when the sky grows dark, Our fields will grow no grain Till other hands can trace the arc, And set these stones again. |
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