Elegy in Joy (excerpt)
By Muriel Rukeyser
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
"Elegy in Joy" appears in Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems, an anthology of nature poems published by New Directions. Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) has my vote for one of the most underrated poets of her century. A New York City native, she attended Vassar College and Columbia University. She is remembered as an especially socially engaged poet, heavily influenced by witnessing the Scottsboro trial and working at the defense clinic that handled its appeals. Not counting her 'collected' and 'selected,' she published at least eighteen books of poetry, as well as seven works of prose, four plays, and four anthologies of her letters. She also translated the poetry of Octavio Paz. Of Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich writes that she "was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."
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