The Cry Going Out Over Pastures
I love you so much with this alive and lonely body. My body is a young hawk sitting on a tree by the Mississippi, in early spring, before any green has appeared on the earth beneath. Some days walnut hollows in my chest fill with crackling light and shadows. There birds drink from water drops...My body loves you with what it extracts from the prudent man, hunched over his colony of lizards; and with that it loves you madly, beyond all rules and conventions. Even the six holes in the flute move about under the dark man's fingers, and the piercing cry goes out over the overgrown pastures no one sees or visits at dusk except the deer, out of all enclosures, who has never seen any bed but his own of wild grass.
I first met you when I had been alone for nine days, and now my lonely hawk body longs to be with you, whom it remembers...it knew how close we are, we would always be. There is death but also this closeness, this joy when the bee rises into the air above his hive to find the sun, to become the son, and the traveler moves through exile and loss, through murkiness and failure, to touch the earth again of his own kingdom and kiss the ground...
What shall I say of this? I say, praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name...
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From "Reaching Out To The World", White Pine Press/ Buffalo, NY. Copyright © 2009 by Robert Bly. (Photo)
