Gradually |
[Mar. 14th, 2004|06:14 am]
rejectomorph
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Some nights seem to drag. The moon is late again. I think perhaps it is already risen, and lost in a high fog, but no. Slow, ponderous, more than half dark, it heaves itself up to cast a pallid light, as though the climb had sapped its energy. The land's obscure face is barely changed. Wan, it sleeps, folded in its own shadows, and waits for sunrise.
Driftwood
by Richard Wilbur
In greenwoods once these relics must have known A rapt, gradual growing, That are cast here like slag of the old Engine of grief;
Must have affirmed in annual increase Their close selves, knowing Their own nature only, and that Bringing to leaf.
Say, for the seven cities or a war Their solitude was taken, They into masts shaven, or milled into Oar and plank;
Afterward sailing long and to lost ends, By groundless water shaken, Well they availed their vessels till they Smashed or sank.
Then on the great generality of waters Floated their singleness, And in all that deep subsumption they were Never dissolved;
But shaped and flowingly fretted by the waves' Ever surpassing stress, With the gnarled swerve and tangle of tides Finely involved.
Brought in the end where breakers dump and slew On the grass verge of the land, Silver they rang to the stones when the sea Flung them and turned.
Curious crowns and scepters they look to me Here on the gold sand, Warped, wry, but having the beauty of Excellence earned.
In a time of continual dry abdications And of damp complicities, They are fit to be taken for signs, these emblems Royally sane,
Which have ridden to homeless wreck, and long revolved In the lathe of all the seas, But have saved in spite of it all their dense Ingenerate grain.
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