Reply #18: The Voice

[dweller]

Small blue flowers like points
of sky were planted to pin
the earth above me, and still
I went on reaching through leaf
and grass blade and the saw-toothed
arms of thistles for the sky
that dozed above my death.
When the first winter came
I slept and wakened in late March
to hear the flooded fields
singing their hymns to the birds.
The birds returned. And so it was
that I began to learn what changes
I had undergone. Not as in
as sea change had I been pared
down to the white essential
bones, nor did i remain huddled
around the silence after the breath
stormed and collapsed. I was large,
at first a meadow where wild
mustard quivered in warm winds.
Then I slipped effortlessly up
the foothills overlooking
that great awakening valley.
Then it seemed I was neither
the valley below or the peaks above
but a great breathing silence
that turned slowly through darkness
and light, which were the same,
toward darkness and light. I
remember the first time I spoke
in a human voice. I had been
sweeping away the last of sunset
in a small rural town, and I
passed shuddering through a woman
on her solitary way home, her arms
loaded with groceries. She said,
Oh my God! as though she were
lost and frightened, and so I let
the light linger until she found
her door. In truth for a while
I was scared of myself, even
my name scared me, for that's
what I'd been taught, but in
a single round of seasons I saw
no harm could come from me and now
I embrace whatever pleases me,
and the earth is my one home,
as it always was, the earth
and perhaps some day the sky too
and all the climbing things between.

Philip Levine
the Poet's Choice, 1980

Peace,
dp