To speak of sorrow works upon it moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul’s hall— out in the light it shows clear, whether shrunken or known as a giant wrath— discrete at […]
A Gift by Denise Levertov
Just when you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions, you are given the questions of others to hold in the emptiness of your hands, songbird eggs that can still hatch if you keep them warm, butterflies opening and closing themselves in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure their scintillant […]
The Fountain by Denise Levertov
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts. I have seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall and you drinking there. And I too before your eyes found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water. The woman of that place, shading her eyes, frowned as […]
Primary Wonder by Denise Levertov
Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes, the […]
The Avowal Denise Levertov
As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them, so would I learn to attain freefall, and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace.
Making Peace by Denise Levertov
(Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla) A voice from the dark called out, “The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war.” But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before […]
O Taste and See by Denise Levertov
The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince, living in the […]
Web by Denise Levertov
Intricate and untraceable weaving and interweaving, dark strand with light: Designed, beyond all spiderly contrivance, to link, not to entrap: Elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined; shaking, changing forever forming, transforming; All praise, all praise to the great web.
Winter Meditation by Denise Levertov
The bare trees have made up their seed bundles. They are ready now. The warm brown light pauses briefly, shrugs and moves on. They are ready now to play dead for a while. I, human, have not as yet devised how to obtain such privilege. Their spring will find them rested. I and my kind […]
Witness by Denise Levertov
Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence.