Poetry Monday: Today

 

Today

 The ordinary miracle begins. Somewhere

 a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays

 come down. A tomorrow has come. Open

 your hands, lift them: morning rings

 all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.

 Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,

 you could close your eyes and go on full of light. 

 And it is already begun, the chord

 that will shiver glass, the song full of time

 bending above us. Outside, a sign: 

a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,

 “be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant

 has passed through town, widening the streets, touching

 the ground, shouldering away the stars.

 William Stafford

 from his book of poems My Name Is William Tell

 In his short book of mostly prose, You Must Revise Your Life, William Stafford shares a memory he suggests as one source of his poetic character. When he was in high school, one weekend evening he rode his bike ten miles out of a town to a secluded spot near a river, and spent the night in his improvised sleeping bag. He awoke while it was dark and still, under a sky of stars.

 He watched the night end. “The morning was dim, sure, an imperceptible brightening of sky with yellow, gray, orange and then the powerful sun. That encounter with the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky has never left me. The earth was my home; I would never feel lost while it held me.”

 That sense and even that event seem present in this poem, written perhaps 60 years later, near the end of his life. For some of us now, the power of the sun may seem threatening. But Stafford’s experience happened in the Midwest during the Great Depression, when drought added to the miseries of a wounded economy.  Against that, he feels the serenity of the earth, sun and stars.  They will do what they do according to forces governing them, not according to human wishes.

It's hard to see the earth and sun as serene these days, just as it is sometimes difficult to see the dawn of a new day as cause for much more than anxiety. Yet the poet had this cosmic feeling in bad times as well.  For self-aware humans,  the rhythm of night and day sing a “song full of time.” The “ordinary miracle” of the giant sun robustly brings a new day, for ready or not, “ a tomorrow has come.”  That 'a" is an important word--it means possibility.  It means life.