18 Feb 2006 (updated 25 Aug 2006 at 01:59 UTC)
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love this book 'A Muriel Rukeyser Reader' edited by Jan Heller Levi who was Muriel Rukeyser's personal assistant from 1878 to 1980. Selected a few as illustrations of 'the stupidest war' thread.
THE RETURN
An idea ran about the world
screaming with the pain of the mind
until it met a child
who stopped it with a word.
The idea leaned over those newborn eyes
and dreamed of the nature of things:
the nature of memory and the nature of love;
and forgave itself and all men.
Quieted in a sea of sleeping
the Idea began its long return --
renewed by the child's sea-colored eyes
remembered the flesh, smiled and said:
I see birds, spring and the birthplace
unknown by the stable stone.
I know light and I know motion
and I remember I am not alone.
The Idea voyaged nearer my breathing, saying
Come balance come
into the love of these faces and forces
find us our equilibrium.
And the child stirred, askng his questions.
The Idea grew more fleshly and spoke:
Beaten down I was
Down I knew very long
Newborn I begin.
And the child went on asking his questions.
The Idea journeying into my body
retuend, and I knew the nature of One,
and could forget One, and turn to the child,
and whole could turn to the world again.
Until the pain turns into answers
and all the masters become askers
And all the victims again doers
And all the sources break in light.
The child goes alive, asking his questions.
RECOVERING
Dream of the world
speaking to me.
The dream of the dead
acted out in me.
The fathers shouting
across their blue gulf.
A storm in each word,
an incomplete universe.
Lightening in brain,
slow-time recovery.
In the light of October
things emrege clear.
The force of looking
returns to my eyes.
Darkness arrives
splitting the mind open.
Something again
is beginning to be born.
A dance is
dancing me.
I wake in the dark.
THEN
When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.