Winter has arrived early this year and yesterday brought our first snow! It was beautiful.
THE RIVER
There is a radiance inside the winter woods
That calls each soul by name:
Wind in young boughs, trees shaking off thick coats of snow,
The rattle of frozen rain on a barn roof: all these
Will help you lose your way
And find a silence older than the sky
That makes our being here a murmur only,
That makes me walk along the river
Beyond where it has flooded itself
While freezing over, past these dead firs,
The great assembly of cedars,
So that I must say, I do not know why I am here,
And move around in those few words
And feel their many needles
Upon my lips and warm them on my tongue
Though I say nothing, for it is a calm
Beyond the calm I know
That wants to talk now, after all these years
Of hearing me say spruce, wind, cloud and face,
Not knowing the first thing about them all,
Not knowing the simplest thing,
That every word said well is praise:
And someone deep inside me wants to say
I am not lost but there are many paths!
While someone else will whisper back,
So you are on the longest quest of all,
The quest for home, and not appear
Though I have walked along the river now
These good five miles
While letting wind push me a little way
And letting thoughts grow slow and weak
Before I feed them words, for what
Is told to me this afternoon
Is simply river , with each I and it dissolved,
A cold truth but a truth indeed
Held tight on the way back
Past curves and forks, as evening takes hold,
A strange light all the way
That falls between the words that I would use
When talking of this strangeness or this light
So that I speak in small, slow breaths
Of evening, cedar, cone and ice
In words that stick to skin – That calls each soul by name:
Wind in young boughs, trees shaking off thick coats of snow,
The rattle of frozen rain on a barn roof: all these
Will help you lose your way
And find a silence older than the sky
That makes our being here a murmur only,
That makes me walk along the river
Beyond where it has flooded itself
While freezing over, past these dead firs,
The great assembly of cedars,
So that I must say, I do not know why I am here,
And move around in those few words
And feel their many needles
Upon my lips and warm them on my tongue
Though I say nothing, for it is a calm
Beyond the calm I know
That wants to talk now, after all these years
Of hearing me say spruce, wind, cloud and face,
Not knowing the first thing about them all,
Not knowing the simplest thing,
That every word said well is praise:
And someone deep inside me wants to say
I am not lost but there are many paths!
While someone else will whisper back,
So you are on the longest quest of all,
The quest for home, and not appear
Though I have walked along the river now
These good five miles
While letting wind push me a little way
And letting thoughts grow slow and weak
Before I feed them words, for what
Is told to me this afternoon
Is simply river , with each I and it dissolved,
A cold truth but a truth indeed
Held tight on the way back
Past curves and forks, as evening takes hold,
A strange light all the way
That falls between the words that I would use
When talking of this strangeness or this light
So that I speak in small, slow breaths
Of evening, cedar, cone and ice
-Kevin Hart
~ Love & Light ~
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