Hold your breath!
Pressed close to my lover in the mountain,
Hidden away like children, he and I
Until the shadows of the sun climb past the mountain-top.
The kawa leaves have risen high toward me!
Climb the high tree, break off, O piu,
The branch of the treasure.
Swing over the precipice we call Flowers-at-the-Peak.
My garland makes my lover happy.
Lightning flashes on the mountainflowers
Like my eyes calling you
To sleep in shame at the house of songs.
For the first time, you see the ripe and lovely fruit.
I also have seen you before, while you were tabu.
When I lay down with the chief, the sun was hot,
Handsome, you came along the stream,
My chief, my love, my soul, my palm-leaf.
My shining leaf. Farewell. The cloth is wet with tears,
mucus and tears.
I am wet, swollen and wet and left alone.
You are away on the far, silent river.
RARI FOR O'OTUA
by Moa Tetua
The sun climbs, hot and burning overhead
And they return, deep in me, thoughts of love.
I sail a surf-board, landing on your shore,
And my soul walks toward you, stops. I startle you.
In the night, it is good for man to be unwed,
We are locked together till dawn is on the sea.
The last day, when I have to go, we weep.
I cannot take my eyes from your tattooing.
My garlands, my potent fruit-plucking pole, go down to the shadows.
—You are the virile one, scented with oils, the lover.
Pick my flower, O'Otua.
Kiss the superb wide-awake flower,
It is love burning in my heart.
Cut it…hurry up the path!
My hand, haphazard, crushes the whiteness of love.
My opened clothes were torn like this, and the clasps.
A TRUE CONFESSION
by Moa Tetua
A true confession!
My love is gone in an earth-clinging rainbow!
She is gone! My eyes are blind with tears, mist before mountains,
The sea grows smaller, feebler,
And rain pours down indeed.
My tears flow from the prison.
I dream of the after-life and of my love.
The sea of my sweetheart is at low tide,
Love in my heart.
Then dawn-clouds come, the clouds dear to the god,
Great clouds rise up, up to the source of love.
Two lovers parted, and my finished dream.
The surf rises, I am held fast, taken,
Held fast, flung away, cast out on coral reefs.
Into the depths, roar upon roar!
CAREFUL OF THE DAY
by Moa Tetua
Care for love tenderly, it is deep in me.
Be careful of the day when you are old,
And old, the garlands are gone and the love-making.
Can you forget
The day we wandered into the strange cave
When we were lost?
The moon was new;
When we were parted from each other
There was only hunger. —
I turn my head,
My head is in the shadow of a high-standing flower.
I know my real food.
RARI FOR HEPUHEKU
by Puko'i
O my singing lover
Bringing strength and love.
O my singing lover
Bring me a child!
Uncover the Chinese cloth!
O my singing lover,
I gave you a hat and garland
Of vanilla flowers,
Half-opened laurel blossoms,
Half-opened laurel blossoms,
Half-opened laurel flowers!
Come, gardenia of Tahiti,
Strike with the rice-white weapon,
Into heaven twist and turn
The circumcised end—
Raise the blue flower!
RARI
by Taman
I wear a garland and take my beloved's hand,
Dewdrops are in my song, dewdrops.
A gift of a wreath, a gift of peace.
Strong fires disturb her, the girl is mad with love.
My thoughts are sad, in the cruel mists and mountains.
I weep as I make my clothes. I sing. Why has he gone?
I wear a garland of seven-petaled flowers.
The mountains are our love, the sky our clothing,
And wreaths our destruction.
RARI TO ENCOURAGE YOUTH
by Kahu'Einui
When a man's body is young
At night he gives up his sleep
And sings, and sings!
Lovesick, with the singing sickness,
With the dizzy sickness,
When even earth and clouds flame with desire!
Chorus. Until the body is like an old woman,
Like an eel in a hole in the sea,
Pounding, pounding!
RARI, TO BE BOTHERED BY MOSQUITOES
by Te'i'i Puei
Here's the story, my darling, of the dancing flower.
Song of nothing, song of nothing at all.
What about it?
Chorus. How can I stay alone?
How can I live alone?
How can I love alone?
How can I sing alone?
From Sombre-water came the love
I dreamed of in the night.
Until the cock crowed I had my joy,
And I sweated.
My lover is carried on currents of the sea!
And I stay to sleep alone,
Bothered by mosquitoes,
And sleeping all alone!
NOT BEFORE I FALL ASLEEP
The clouds are dark
Above the mountain-top—
The sweet-smelling skin
Of my love, and her gay garlands!
O not too soon, not too soon,
Not before I fall asleep….
Chorus. You desire me! You love me!
You make me fall with you in a comet.
A song, a song.
For your brow a wreath and a song.
Easter Eve 1945
EASTER EVE 1945
Wary of time O it seizes the soul tonight
I wait for the great morning of the west
confessing with every breath mortality.
Moon of this wild sky struggles to stay whole
and on the water silvers the ships of war.
I go alone in the black-yellow light
all night waiting for day, while everywhere the sure
death of light, the leaf's sure return to the root
is repeated in million, death of all man to share.
Whatever world I know shines ritual death,
wide under this moon they stand gathering fire,
fighting with flame, stand fighting in their graves.
All shining with life as the leaf, as the wing shines,
the stone deep in the mountain, the drop in the green wave.
Lit by their energies, secretly, all things shine.
Nothing can black that glow of life; although
each part go crumbling down
itself shall rise up whole.
Now I say there are new meanings; now I name
death our black honor and feast of possibility
to celebrate casting of life on life. This earth-long day
between blood and resurrection where we wait
remembering sun, seed, fire; remembering
that fierce Judaean Innocent who risked
every immortal meaning on one life.
Given to our year as sun and spirit are,
as seed we are blessed only in needing freedom.
; Now I say that the peace the spirit needs is peace,
not lack of war, but fierce continual flame.
For all men : effort is freedom, effort's peace,
it fights. And along these truths the soul goes home,
flies in its blazing to a place
more safe and round than Paradise.
Night of the soul, our dreams in the arms of dreams
dissolving into eyes that look upon us.
Dreams the sources of action, the meeting and the end,
a resting-place among the flight of things.
And love which contains all human spirit, all wish,
the eyes and hands, sex, mouth, hair, the whole woman—
fierce peace I say at last, and the sense of the world.
In the time of conviction of mortality
whatever survive, I remember what I am.—
The nets of this night are on fire with sun and moon
pouring both lights into the open tomb.
Whatever arise, it comes in the shape of peace,
fierce peace which is love, in which move all the stars,
and the breathing of universes, filling, falling away,
and death on earth cast into the human dream.
What fire survive forever
myself is for my time.
PRIVATE LIFE OF THE SPHINX
for Ella Winter
1
Simply because of a question, my life is implicated:
my flesh and answer fly between chaos and their need.
On the rock I asked the shaky king
one foolish question to make him look at himself—
He looked. Beheld himself and kingdoms. Took.
My claws and smile transferred into his myth.
Babble of demand, and answers building the brilliant cities
the standing battlefields and the fields of the fallen down.
Now in this city in the Lounge of Time,
I tell you it was a legend founded on fire,
founded on what we are. Simply because I asked one question,
“What is this, What?” so that the answer must be “Man.”
Because of that they bring their riddles and rhyme
to my door if I houseless run throughout the world,
torse of a woman and quarters of a lion.
2
Open war with its images of love and death—
man, an explosion walking through the night in
rich and intolerable loneliness.
Cathedrals writhing gold against their clouds
and a child asking the fiery pure questions.
The monkey-dark, a month of smoky violets,
delicate repose of my reality among
dreams, and the angel of the resurrection,
a mouth overhead, the sky planted with stars.
My questions are my body. And among this glowing, this sure,
this fact, this mooncolored breast, I make memorial.
3
My body is set against disorder. Risen among enigmas,
time and the question carry a rose of form,
sing a life-song. Strangler and bitch, they said,
but they mistook the meaning of my name:
I am the root who embraces and the source.
I sing. I sing.
In these cities, all suffer from their weaknesses—
they lack some gut, they are ill, they have womb-envy,
run howling from the question and the act.
They bring me their need for answers in their hands and eyes.
To embody truth, the Irish old man said.
I remember in Calabria a peasant
broad, smiling, and sly, with a bird throbbing and small
behind his back, in his hands; and he asked his question.
Is it alive? and he smiled at me. Then I knew
if I said Yes, he would twist the sparrow's neck.
The fool of time! I gave him my only answer,
that answer of time:
Fool, I said, you know it depends on you
whether it live or die.
4
I answer! I fly reborn from deep escape!
Listen to their cries, the selfsame crying throats,
crying the selfsame need.
Here is my self. I touch you, life reaches me.
You touch me, I am able to give my gifts.
All the acts flow together, a form being made.
I know a garden beyond questioning—
can almost see night-flowering white mallows,
can almost tell you below the sound of water,
white lilac like a voluptuous light
shining at full on our two faces—
It goes ahead of our hope. It is the secret that moves
with the speed of life,
secrets of night and the street
secrets of milk and dinner and daylight,
enigmas of gardens, the kitchen and the bed,
the riddle and sacrament in the knot of wood,
in the wine, in the water and root the coil of life.
They ask for answers, they starving eat their shadows.
The beginning is always here. Its green demand.
5
They think I answer and strangle. They are wrong.
I set my life among the questioning.
The peasant, the wars, the wounded powerful king.
The shining of questions which cannot be concealed
lies in that mirror. The little child to the mother
of the father's unspoken death, said : “You have told me
yourself.”
Even alone, away from daily life, the fire
and monster crown of the legend over me
reaches their eyes—children, friendship of lions,
the sense of the world at last broken through to man
in all fury, all sacred open mystery,
is in my question.
The stranger, the foreign and strong,
the child and king, wide village eyes of the farm,
the demand loud, or choking in surf-foam,
density of flowers, the faces of all love,
the core of our hope; stronger than kill,
stronger almost than question, almost than song.
NINE POEMS FOR THE UNBORN CHILD
1
The childless years alone without a home
Flashed daily with the world's glimpse, happiness.
Always behind was the dark screen of loss
Hardly moving, like heavy hardly-moving cloud.
“Give me myself,” or “Take me,” I said aloud;
There was little to give, and always less to take.
Except the promise, except the promise darkness
Makes, night and daylight, miracle to come.
Flying over, I suddenly saw the traces
Of man : where man is, you may read the wind
In shadow and smoke, know how the wind is gone
And know the way of man; in the fall of the plane
Into its levels, encounter the ancient spaces:
The fall to life, the cliff and strait of bone.
2
They came to me and said, “There is a child.”
Fountains of images broke through my land.
My swords, my fountains spouted past my eyes
And in my flesh at last I saw. Returned
To when we drove in the high forest, and earth
Turned to glass in the sunset where the wild
Trees struck their roots as deep and visible
As their high branches, the double planted world.
“There is no father,” they came and said to me.
—I have known fatherless children, the searching, walk
The world, look at all faces for their father's life.
Their choice is death or the world. And they do choose.
Earn their brave set of bone, the seeking marvelous look
Of those who lose and use and know their lives.
3
There is a place. There is a miracle.
I know the nightmare, the black and bone piano,
The statues in the kitchen, a house dissolving in air.
I know the lilac-turreted cathedral
Taking its roots from willows that changed before my eyes
When all became real, real as the sound of bells.
We earthly are aware of transformation;
Miraculously, life, from the old despair.
The wave of smooth water approaches on the sea-
Surface, a live wave individual
Linking, massing its color. Moving, is struck by wind,
Ribbed, steepened, until the slope and ridge begin;
Comes nearer, brightens. Now curls, its vanishing
Hollows darken and disappear; now high above
Me, the scroll, froth, foam of the overfall.
4
Now the ideas all change to animals
Loping and gay, now all the images
Transform to leaves, now all these screens of leaves
Are flowing into rivers, I am in love
With rivers, these changing waters carry voices,
Carry all children; carry all delight.
The water-soothed winds move warm above these waves.
The child changes and moves among these waves.
The waves are changing, they tremble from waves of waters
To other essentials—they become waves of light
And wander through my sleep and through my waking,
And through my hands and over my lips and over
Me; brilliant and transformed and clear,
The pure light. Now I am light and nothing more.
5
Eating sleep, eating sunlight, eating meat,
Lying in the sun to stare
At deliverance, the rapid cloud,
Gull-wing opposing sun-bright wind,
I see the born who dare
Walk on green, walk against blue,
Move in the nightlong flare
Of love on darkness, traveling
Among the rings of light to simple light,
From nowhere to nowhere.
And in my body feel the seasons grow.
Who is it in the dim room? Who is there?
6
Death's threat! Today I have known laughter
As if for the first time; have seen into your eyes,
Death, past the still gaze, and found two I love.
One chose you gladly with a laugh advancing,
His hands full of guns, on the enemy in Spain.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 30
