Two selections from the Writer’s Almanac speak to me, so I want to share them with you.
Today’s poem asks what “far-off and half-forgotten country” within us is waiting for us to visit. What will we hear there? Who waits for us there?
Music
by Anne Porter
When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother’s piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold
And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying
Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country
I’ve never understood
Why this is so
But there’s an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow
For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest
And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country
We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams
And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows
Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.
A few days ago I was struck by two lines by Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario (1867-1916). They too lean toward something hidden within us that we can, perhaps, only welcome:
Pity for him who one day looks upon
his inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.
