WHAT REMAINS AFTER LOSS (WHEATCHILD)

A friend commented that a lot of my poems try to discover what remains after loss – of love, of beloved landscape. There is of course the inner beloved, and an inner landscape that never parts from us. One of my poems even used to have the title “The Landscape Within Me Is Not the Landscape Outside Me” – this became “Everlasting.” But in this post I want to focus on certain memories of wheat fields.


The first poem -- it's more of a fragment -- has been influenced by a late canto of Pound's that contains the passage 


what that lovest best remains, 
what thou lovest best 
shall not be reft from thee


**

What Remains

What is new will be taken away, 

but not what began before time began: 

the silence of Polish fields, 
a path of sunlight across sunlight –

then a rooster’s call so pure,

you know it’s from another world.

~ Oriana

**

Wheatchild

So new I was still allowed

to run naked, I’d step

into wheat. The stalks closed

above my head.

Laughing I would enter
such a golden drowning.

Cornflowers. The sun split

into a thousand sheaves.

Memory has no past tense.

Laughing I step out,

a child clothed with light,
at the beginning of the world.


~ Oriana

**

W. S. Merwin has a poem in which he tells about this experience of timelessness, which for me is the essence of the magic of memory.

Still Morning

There appears there is only one

age and it knows

nothing of age as the flying birds know

nothing of the air they are flying through

or of the day that bears them up

through themselves

am I a child before there are words

arms are holding me up in a shadow

voices murmur in a shadow

as I watch one patch of sunlight moving

across the green carpet

in a building

gone long ago and all the voices

silent and each word they said in that time

silent now

while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

~ W. S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius