Gaza has become a funeral home, 
but there are no seats, 
no mourners, no bodies. 
In the caskets are nothing but 
what remained of the dead’s clothes, 
and on the crumbling walls are clocks 
that have not moved for fourteen months.

O but my delicate lover, 
Is she not fair as the moonlight? 
Is she not supple and strong
          For hurried passion? 

Has not the god of the green world, 
In his large tolerant wisdom, 
Filled with the ardours of earth 
          Her twenty summers? 

Well did he make her for loving;
Well did he mould her for beauty;
Gave her the wish that is brave 
          With understanding. 

“O Pan, avert from his maiden
Sorrow, misfortune, bereavement, 
Harm, and unhappy regret,”
          Prays one fond mortal.

The Soul has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –

Salute her, with long fingers –
Caress her freezing hair –
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover – hovered – o’er –
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme – so – fair ­–

The soul has moments of escape –
When bursting all the doors –
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings opon the Hours,

As do the Bee – delirious borne –
Long Dungeoned from his Rose –
Touch Liberty – then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise –

The Soul’s retaken moments –
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the song,

The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue –

Everyone’s so quick to blame my
tenderness. My wound opening like a mouth
to kiss an arrow’s steel beak.

A beautiful man, now, plants his face
in Trojan sand while I tell
the secrets of his body—

make the ground red with truth.
Red with the death of Achilles, felled
by an arrow’s bite when nothing—

nothing—could puncture his Kevlar skin.
Everyone skips ahead to the moral: don’t
be a heel. For just one day I felt

sun where the chafing bonds of sandal
should have been. Without me, he’d be
just more fodder for the cannon.

I made him a hero, Troy’s poster
boy. Everyone forgets I was part of him,
I needed him—that even as he died,

I tasted each pulse—
that I could not hold back its rush of red
birds or the season to which they flew.

Today the dragonflies return.
The courtyard bursts an insanity of roses.

Today is dense with love perfume.
Ardent sun. The proximity of birds.

Roses bloom just to be noticed. The blessed
blossoms know this is their only purpose.

I await my sojourner, again weary 
from his wandering, and putting to rest 

my witch’s ways. In love I pine
for him but it is air that sustains me.

My Father-light rises spinning, fueling
the world. Life is renewed.

An admirer could remark God is good to me. 
I pray to amplify the burgeoning. Sanctified

I summon a storm, track its thrust with slow eyes.
The lightning will be startling and insistent,

thunder’s belated warning full of bravado.
Mother Moon will kiss withered petals full again.

Fortified by dancing planets, my warrior
will be valiant against the humors of the day, 

I sing a lullaby. It will be a night of dreams.
He will wake refreshed.

His sleeping breath frees me
from the prison of my sorcery.

^{George Steiner, “The Poetry of Thought”}

Unlike the
work of
most people
you’re supposed
to unthread
the needle.
It will be
a lifetime
task, far
from simple:
the empty eye
achievable—
possibly—but
it’s going
to take
fake sewing
worthy of
Penelope.

Pan came out of the woods one day,—
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,—
     And stood in the sun and looked his fill
     At wooded valley and wooded hill.

He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
     He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.
     That was well! And he stamped a hoof.

He heart knew peace, for none came here
To this lean feeding save once a year
Someone to salt the half-wild steer,
     Or homespun children with clicking pails
     Who see so little they tell no tales.

He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach
A new-world song, far out of reach,
For a sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech
     And the whimper of hawks beside the sun
     Were music enough for him, for one.

Times were changed from what they were:
Such pipes kept less of power to stir
The fruited bough of the juniper
     And the fragile bluets clustered there
     Than the merest aimless breath of air.

They were pipes of pagan mirth,
And the world had found new terms of worth.
He laid him down on the sun-burned earth
     And ravelled a flower and looked away—
     Play? Play?—What should he play?

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.