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Nativity

 

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?

just to hear his sister

promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,

just to hear his brother say,

a house inside a house,

but most of all to hear his mother answer,

One more song, then you go to sleep.

 

How could anyone in that bed guess

the question finds its beginning

in the answer long growing

inside the one who asked, that restless boy,

the night’s darling?

 

Later, a man lying awake,

he might ask it again,

just to hear the silence

charge him, This night

arching over your sleepless wondering,

 

this night, the near ground

every reaching-out-to overreaches,

 

just to remind himself

out of what little earth and duration,

out of what immense good-bye,

 

each must make a safe place of his heart,

before so strange and wild a guest

as God approaches.

 

            Li-young Lee

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It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled in not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

                                 Wendell Berry

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Sonnet 73

 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereupon it must expire,

Consumed with that with which it was nourished by.

    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

 

        William Shakespeare