Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles 
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

A Marriage

Robert Creely

The first retainer 
he gave to her 
was a golden 
wedding ring. 

The second—late at night 
he woke up, 
leaned over on an elbow, 
and kissed her. 

The third and the last — 
he died with 
and gave up loving 
and lived with her. 

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As difference blends into identity

Josephine Miles 

As difference blends into identity
Or blurs into obliteration, we give 
To zero our position at the center 
Withdraw our belief and baggage. 

As rhyme at the walls lapses, at frontiers 
Customs scatter like a flight of snow, 
And boundaries moonlike draw us out, our opponents 
Join us, we are their refuge. 

As barriers between us melt, I may treat you 
Unkindly as myself, I may forget 
Your name as my own. Then enters 
Our anonymous assailant. 

As assonance by impulse burgeons 
And that quaver shakes us by which we are spent, 
We may move to consume another with us, 
Stir into parity another's cyphers. 

Then when our sniper steps to a window 
In the brain, starts shooting, and we fall surprised, 
Of what we know not do we seek forgiveness 
From ourselves, for ourselves?

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In a Dark Time

Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady stream of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is "I"?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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From East Coker (in the Four Quartets)

by T.S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. 
....
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not. 

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From Little Gidding  (in the Four Quartets)

T.S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

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