This week, I am offering two poems of mine that feel like directives from a younger version of myself, distillations of something essential to my heart— now, before, then, and always.
This first poem was inspired by a Russian fairytale I read many years ago in “ Alexander Afanasyev’s collection (in translation), called “King Bear.” I remain to this day moved in an unsayable way by the children hidden in the earth like bulbs, the bear who smells them out and— beyond the margins of this poem— takes them away on his back to make them his servants. A complex series of encounters ensues with falcons, eagles, a brave bull, a dragon, the Baba Yaga, etc.
There may be another part of this poem to come one day, but for reasons known only to the muses and not to me, this was all of the story that King Bear wanted to reveal to me at the time, this glimpse into the ground’s sweet pelt, this image of children nurtured on roots and darkness, children who have been chosen by a bear to cross the boundary between human and animal.
King Bear Sister is lighting the tallow at daybreak when King Bear comes on cinnamon paws She can see him through the peephole up from the underworld where she and Brother have lived since they were too young to speak Roots and dirt and moles suckled them taught them their own words Sister is translucent like white moths Brother is dark like earth King Bear is snuffing at the ground He is smelling them out He has been searching for a lifetime for the children of the lord who took too many birds from the forest where snow falls unruined his forest where the boots of men should leave no impression There is a bone awl lying on the ground in the empty courtyard of the old kingdom where the children were left behind The bone awl has pierced the leather of shoes the hides of deer the reed baskets that women once wove down by the river When King Bear asks, the awl replies in the voice of a very old woman Underground, King Bear The orphans are under the ground Sylvia V. Linsteadt (c) 2017
This second poem was written after a night sleeping out alone in the sand dunes of Point Reyes five or six years ago, stitched together of the fog-damp notes I made while tucked between tall grasses and lupines, listening to coyotes. It still remains one of the truest love poems to a place I’ve ever written.
Six Songs at Dawn Doe At the top of the far dune a doe is eating dawn’s first flowers, a silhouette made of what remains of the night Everything is pale The ocean has never stopped her incantation The sun breaks beside the doe An old friend returned A swell of fire that spills everywhere Home The sparrows with white crowns are singing the songs their fathers taught them Opening The lupines open their mouths to the dew The sand dunes open their doors to the wasps A family of river otters dives through rushes into the lagoon Wind is pulled across the dunes from the ocean by a heat that lives far away The sand whirls and falls like waves do A thousand broken cocoons from the wasps who live below the surface have blown to the top I walk into the wind into the morning Planet The world is round and spins on its axis like a great wheel Tell me, where have you heard of a greater miracle? For years at a time I forget what it really means: to watch the sun go down one horizon and up another for the moon to fall into a silver tide and resurface at noon the following day wholly elsewhere We are alive amidst dervishes Path The father quails on fenceposts are watchkeepers Every bird has a mother and an old pile of shell Early sun is bright in the yarrow and the velvet grass The path is full of tiny feet But listen how the fathers are calling them all home Sylvia V. Linsteadt (c) 2017
“Tell me, where/have you heard/of a greater miracle?” Thank you so much for this reminder that I so often forget what a miracle the rotation of a planet around a sun and the moon circling the planet is. Truly, truly an extraordinarily beautiful thing!
Lovely. Thank you Sylvia