A Poem For Today - The Doorway

[KDick...@aol.com]

 

The Doorway

 

I wanted to stay as I was

still as the world is never still,

not in midsummer but the moment before

the first flower forms, the moment

nothing is as yet past-

 

not midsummer, the intoxicant,

but late spring, the grass not yet

high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips

beginning to open-

 

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others,

the ones who go first,

a tense cluster of limbs, alert to

the failures of others, the public falterings

 

with a child's fierce confidence of imminent power

preparing to defeat

these weaknesses, to succumb

to nothing, the time directly

 

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery

 

before the appearance of the gift,

before possession.

 

Louise Gluck

[Jai Conley]

Hmm. This one's an all-day Tootsie Roll to savor, except that it's a very high grade of confection. I think one needs to let a poem such as this soak into one's psyche over time. You feel something right away and more, different, and deeper as it works inside you.  Thanks for bringing Louise Gluck's profound poems to our, or, at least, my, attention, Ken.

Jai

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“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”   

The Dalai Lama

Jai (John) Conley
Award-Winning Technical and Professional Writer
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[Marvin Glass]

Ken; Lovely poem of Louise Gluck.  I hope others continue to

discover her. The deep intimacy of her expressed Being. Never self-congratulatory,

everything fresh from the cauldron of her human suffering. The poem answers the

question Simone Weil once posed as the only one worth asking: "How is it going with

your struggle:?       With great Affection, Marvin