Return

This Earth the king said

Looking at the ground;

This England. But we drive

A Sunday paradise

Of parkway, trees flow into trees and the grass

Like water by the very asphalt crown

And summit of things

In the flow of traffic

The family cars, in the dim

Sound of the living

The noise of increase to which we owe

What we possess. We cannot reconcile ourselves.

No one is reconciled, tho we spring

From the ground together—

And we saw the seed,

The minuscule Sequoia seed

In the museum by the tremendous slab

Of the tree. And imagined the seed

In soil and the growth quickened

So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing

Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green

Needles of a redwood until the tree

Stood in the room without soil—

How much of the earth's

Crust has lived

The seed’s violence!

The shock is metaphysical.

For the wood weathers. Drift wood

And the foot print in the forest grow older.

This is not our time, not what we mean, it is a time

Passing, the curl at the cutwater,

The enormous prow

Outside in the weather. In that breeze,

The sense of that passage,

Is desertion,

Betrayal, that we are not innocent

Of loneliness as Pierrot, Pierrette chattering

Unaware tho we imagine nothing

Beyond the streets of the living—

A sap in the limbs. Mary,

Mary, we turn to the children

As they will turn to the children

Wanting so much to have created happiness

As if a stem to the leaves—

—we had camped in scrub,

A scrub of the past, the fringes of towns

Neither towns nor forest, nothing ours. And Linda five,

Maybe six when the mare grazing

In the meadow came to her.

‘Horse,’ she said, whispering

By the roadside

With the cars passing. Little girl welcomed,

Learning welcome. The rest is—

Whatever—whatever—remote

Mechanics, endurance,

The piers of the city

In the sea. Here are whole buildings

Razed, whole blocks

Of a city gone

Among old streets

And the old boroughs, ourselves

Among these streets where Petra beat

A washpan out her window gathering

A crowd like a rescue. Relief,

As they said it, The Relief. Petra

Decisive suddenly among her children

In those crumbling bedrooms, Petra,

Petra—. And how imagine it? or imagine

Coughlin in the streets,

Pelley and the Silver Shirts? The medieval sense seems innocent, the very

Ceremony of innocence that was drowned.

It was not. But how imagine it

Of streets boarded and vacant where no time will hatch

Now chairs and walls,

Floors, roofs, the joists and beams,

The woodwork, window sills

In sun in a great weight of brick.

Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002)