Night Mirror (by Li-Young Lee)

Li-Young, don’t feel lonely

when you look up

into great night and find

yourself the far face peering

hugely out from between

a star and a star. All that space

the nighthawk plunges through,

homing, all that distance beyond embrace,

what is it but your own infinity.
 

And don’t be afraid

when, eyes closed, you look inside you

and find night is both

the silence tolling after stars

and the final word

that founds all beginning, find night,

abyss and shuttle,

a finished cloth

frayed by the years, then gathered

in the songs and games

mothers teach their children.

Look again

and find yourself changed

and changing, now the bewildered honey

fallen into your own hands,

now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.

Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.

And time? Time is the salty wake

of your stunned entrance upon

no name.

………

Not Moving Even One Step (by Jane Hirschfield)

The rain falling too lightly to shape

an audible house, an audible tree,

blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.

He knows the field for exactly what it is:

his limitless mare, his beloved.

Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned

in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.

Slow rain streams from the fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,

while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees.

The muzzles almost touch.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

………

Nativity (by Li-Young Lee)

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?

just to hear his sister

promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,

just to hear his brother say,

A house inside a house,

but most of all to hear his mother answer,

One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess

the question finds its beginning

in the answer long growing

inside the one who asked, that restless boy,

the night's darling?

Later, a man lying awake,

he might ask it again,

just to hear the silence

charge him, This night

arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground

every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself

out of what little earth and duration,

out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,

before so strange and wild a guest

as God approaches.