89
" Yeats—himself, we should note, deeply involved with the struggle for Irish independence—once said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” On the other side of the question, many feel that the abrasions of history upon, within, and against individual lives have been part of poetry’s domain from the start, and that whatever affects a person belongs in poems, and can be joined there to all the rest—the emotional with the intellectual; the personal with the social; the public and the private; the natural world and the humanly made; the coldness of stone and the humanly felt; the knowledge of violent injustice and the longing for lyrical transcendence. "
― Jane Hirshfield , Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
91
" Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me
- 1953-
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year's late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don't despair of this falling world, not yet
didn't it give you the asking "
― Jane Hirshfield
100
" The arborist has determined:
senescence beetles canker
quickened by drought
but in any case
not prunable not treatable not to be propped.
And so.
The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.
The trunk where the ant.
The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.
The bark cambium pine-sap cluster of needles.
The Japanese patterns the ink-net.
The dapple on certain fish.
Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.
The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.
Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.
Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it. "
― Jane Hirshfield , Ledger: Poems