This is not the past walking into the future,
the walk is painful, into the present, the dance
not visible as dance until much later.
These dancers are discoverers of God.
We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.
Out of a life of building lack on lack:
the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:
an army who came to the ocean: the walkers
who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,
city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,
the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,
swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris
and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March:
all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.
Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.
Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death
by his disciples carried from Jerusalem
in blackness journeying to find his journey
to whatever he was loving with his life.
The wilderness journey through which we move
under the whirlwind truth into the new,
the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:
faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching
while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.
Barbarian music, a new song.
Acknowledging opened water, possibility:
open like a woman to this meaning.
In a time of building statues of the stars,
valuing certain partial ferocious skills
while past us the chill and immense wilderness
spreads its one-color wings until we know
rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,
the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.
What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.
Ways to discover. The song of the way in.
FOR THE SONG OF SONGS
However the voices rise
They are the shepherd, the king,
The woman; dreams,
Holy desire.
Whether the voices
Be many the dance around
Or body led by one body
Whose bed is green,
I defend the desire
Lightning and poetry
Alone in the dark city
Or breast to breast.
Champion of light I am
The wounded holy light,
The woman in her dreams
And the man answering.
You who answer their dreams
Are the ruler of wine
Emperor of clouds
And the riches of men.
This song
Is the creation
The day of this song
The day of the birth of the world.
Whether a thousand years
Forget this woman, this king,
Whether two thousand years
Forget the shepherd of dreams.
If none remember
Who is lover, who the beloved,
Whether the poet be
Woman or man,
The desire will make
A way through the wilderness
The leopard mountains
And the lips of the sleepers.
Holy way of desire,
King, lion, the mouth of the poet,
The woman who dreams
And the answerer of dreams.
In these delights
Is eternity of seed,
The verge of life,
Body of dreaming.
THE BONDS
In the wine country, poverty, they drink no wine—
In the endless night of love he lies, apart from love—
In the landscape of the Word he stares, he has no word.
He hates and hungers for his immense need.
He is young. This is a shepherd who rages at learning,
Having no words. Looks past green grass and sees a woman.
She, Rachel, who is come to recognize.
In the huge wordless shepherd she finds Akiba.
To find the burning Word. To learn to speak.
The body of Rachel says, the marriage says,
The eyes of Rachel say, and water upon rock
Cutting its groove all year says All things learn.
He learns with his new son whose eyes are wine.
To sing continually, to find the word.
He comes to teaching, greater than the deed
Because it begets the deed, he comes to the stone
Of long ordeal, and suddenly knows the brook
Offering water, the citron fragrance, the light of candles.
All given, and always the giver loses nothing.
In giving, praising, we move beneath clouds of honor,
In giving, in praise, we take gifts that are given,
The spark from one to the other leaping, a bond
Of light, and we come to recognize the rock;
We are the rock acknowledging water, and water
Fire, and woman man, all brought through wilderness;
And Rachel finding in the wordless shepherd
Akiba who can now come to his power and speak:
The need to give having found the need to become:
More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give such.
AKIBA MARTYR
When his death confronted him, it had the face of his friend
Rufus the Roman general with his claws of pain,
His executioner. This was an old man under iron rakes
Tearing through to the bone. He made no cry.
After the failure of all missions. At ninety, going
To Hadrian in Egypt, the silver-helmed,
Named for a sea. To intercede. Do not build in the rebuilt Temple.
Your statue, do not make it a shrine to you.
Antinous smiling. Interpreters. This is an old man, pleading.
Incense of fans. The emperor does not understand.
He accepts his harvest, failures. He accepts faithlessness,
Madness of friends, a failed life; and now the face of storm.
Does the old man during uprising speak for compromise?
In all but the last things. Not in the study itself.
For this religion is a system of knowledge;
Points may be one by one abandoned, but not the study.
Does he preach passion and non-violence?
Yes, and trees, crops, children honestly taught. He says:
Prepare yourselves for suffering.
Now the rule closes in, the last things are forbidden.
There is no real survival without these.
Now it is time for prison and the unknown.
The old man flowers into spiritual fire.
Streaking of agony across the sky.
Torn black. Red racing on blackness. Dawn.
Rufus looks at him over the rakes of death
Asking, “What is it?
Have you magic powers? Or do you feel no pain?”
The old man answers, “No. But there is a commandment
saying
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
with all thy soul and with all thy might.
I knew that I loved him with all my heart and might.
Now I know that I love him with all my life.”
The look of delight of the martyr
Among the colors of pain, at last knowing his own response
Total and unified.
To love God with all the heart, all passion,
Every desire called evil, turned toward unity,
All the opposites, all in the dialogue.
All the dark and light of the heart, of life made whole.
Surpassing the known life, day and ideas.
My hope
, my life, my burst of consciousness:
To confirm my life in the time of confrontation.
The old man saying Shema.
The death of Akiba.
THE WITNESS
Who is the witness? What voice moves across time,
Speaks for the life and death as witness voice?
Moving tonight on this city, this river, my winter street?
He saw it, the one witness. Tonight the life as legend
Goes building a meeting for me in the veins of night
Adding its scenes and its songs. Here is the man transformed,
The tall shepherd, the law, the false messiah, all;
You who come after me far from tonight finding
These lives that ask you always Who is the witness—
Take from us acts of encounter we at night
Wake to attempt, as signs, seeds of beginning,
Given from darkness and remembering darkness,
Take from our light given to you our meetings.
Time tells us men and women, tells us You
The witness, your moment covered with signs, your self.
Tells us this moment, saying You are the meeting.
You are made of signs, your eyes and your song.
Your dance the dance, the walk into the present.
All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking
To you, in time not yet born.
The witness is myself.
And you,
The signs, the journeys of the night, survive.
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
1
Held between wars
my lifetime
among wars, the big hands of the world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.
The faces of the sufferers
in the street, in dailiness,
their lives showing
through their bodies
a look as of music
the revolutionary look
that says I am in the world
to change the world
my lifetime
is to love to endure to suffer the music
to set its portrait
up as a sheet of the world
the most moving the most alive
Easter and bone
and Faust walking among flowers of the world
and the child alive within the living woman, music of man,
and death holding my lifetime between great hands
the hands of enduring life
that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time,
and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands
may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for
the unknown person
held in the two hands, you.
2
Woman as gates, saying :
“The process is after all like music,
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so.”
A woman pouring her opposites.
“After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?”
“I could not answer this. But I know—
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt
that the life of the workers was beautiful.”
She said, “I am groping in the dark.”
She said, “When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings.”
Saying of her husband : “My wish
is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
Often this love has oppressed me;
I wanted to be free.
But often too it has made me
so terribly happy.”
She said : “We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fell like glittering stars
from our oars.”
She said : “As a matter of fact,
I believe
that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
in my work.”
She said : “The only technique I can still manage.
It's hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
only the essentials count.”
A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me :
“Kollwitz? She's too black-and-white.”
3
Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole
Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street
the corpse with the baby
floating, on the dark river
A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open
4 SONG : THE CALLING-UP
Rumor, stir of ripeness
rising within this girl
sensual blossoming
of meaning, its light and form.
The birth-cry summoning
out of the male, the father
from the warm woman
a mother in response.
The word of death
calls up the fight with stone
wrestle with grief with time
from the material make
an art harder than bronze.
5 SELF-PORTRAIT
Mouth looking directly at you
eyes in their inwardness looking
directly at you
half light half darkness
woman, strong, German, young artist
flows into
wide sensual mouth meditating
looking right at you
eyes shadowed with brave hand
looking deep at you
flows into
wounded brave mouth
grieving and hooded eyes
alive, German, in her first War
flows into
strength of the worn face
a skein of lines
broods, flows into
mothers among the war graves
bent over death
facing the father
stubborn upon the field
flows into
the marks of her knowing—
Nie Wieder Krieg
repeated in the eyes
flows into
“Seedcorn must not be ground
”
and the grooved cheek
lips drawn fine
the down-drawn grief
face of our age
flows into
Pieta, mother and
between her knees
life as her son in death
pouring from the sky of
one more war
flows into
face almost obliterated
hand over the mouth forever
hand over one eye now
the other great eye
closed
5
THE SPEED OF DARKNESS
1
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.
Resurrection music, silence, and surf.
2
No longer speaking
Listening with the whole body
And with every drop of blood
Overtaken by silence
But this same silence is become speech
With the speed of darkness.
3
Stillness during war, the lake.
The unmoving spruces.
Glints over the water.
Faces, voices. You are far away.
A tree that trembles.
I am the tree that trembles and trembles.
4
After the lifting of the mist
after the lift of the heavy rains
the sky stands clear
and the cries of the city risen in day
I remember the buildings are space
walled, to let space be used for living
I mind this room is space
this drinking glass is space
whose boundary of glass
lets me give you drink and space to drink
your hand, my hand being space
containing skies and constellations
your face
carries the reaches of air
I know I am space
my words are air.
5
Between between
the man : act exact
woman : in curve senses in their maze
frail orbits, green tries, games of stars
shape of the body speaking its evidence
6
I look across at the real
vulnerable involved naked
devoted to the present of all I care for
the world of its history leading to this moment.
7
Life the announcer.
I assure you
there are many ways to have a child.
I bastard mother
promise you
there are many ways to be born.
They all come forth
in their own grace.
8
Ends of the earth join tonight
with blazing stars upon their meeting.
These sons, these sons
fall burning into Asia.
9
Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 46
