Imaging, by Marge Piercy

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Imaging

I am my body
This is not a dress, a coat;
not a house I live in;
not a suit of armor for close fighting;
not a lump of meat in which I nuzzle like a worm.

I issue orders from the command tower;
I look out the twin windows staring,
reading the buzz from ears, hands, nose,
weighing, interpreting, forecasting.
Downstairs faceless crowds labor.

I am those mute crowds rushing,
I must glide down the ladder of bone,
I must slide down the silken ropes
of the nerves burning in their darkness,
I must ease into the warm egg of the limbic brain.

Like learning the chemical language of ants,
We enter and join to the body lying
Down as if to a lover. We ourselves,
Caves we must explore in the dark,
Eyes shut tight and hands unclenched.

Estranged from ourselves to the point
Where we scarcely credit the body’s mind,
In we go reclaiming what once we knew.
We wrestle the dark angel of our hidden
Selves, fighting all night for our lives.

Who is this angel I meet on my back,
Radiant as molten steel pouring from the ladle,
Dark as the inside of the moon?
Whose is this strength I wrestle?
-the other my lost holy self.

~~by: Marge Piercy

William Wilfred Campbell, 'An October Evening'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

An October Evening

The woods are haggard and lonely,
The skies are hooded for snow,
The moon is cold in Heaven,
And the grasses are sere below.

The bearded swamps are breathing
A mist from meres afar,
And grimly the Great Bear circles
Under the pale Pole Star.

There is never a voice in Heaven,
Nor ever a sound on earth,
Where the spectres of winter are rising
Over the night's wan girth.

There is slumber and death in the silence,
There is hate in the winds so keen;
And the flash of the north's great sword-blade
Circles its cruel sheen.

The world grows agèd and wintry,
Love's face peakèd and white;
And death is kind to the tired ones
Who sleep in the north to-night.

by William Wilfred Campbell