The Supple Deer

Jane Hirshfield

1953 –

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer:

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

—2007

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Jane Hirshfield

2017

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Jane Hirshfield

2021

Words

Words are loyal.
Whatever they name they take the side of.
As the word courage will afterward grip just as well
the frightened girl soldier who stands on one side of barbed wire,
the frightened boy soldier who stands on the other.
Death’s clay, they look at each other with wide-open eyes.

Jane Hirshfield

2020

Poems

The Supple Deer

More by this poet

Let Them Not Say

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

Words

Poems

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The Supple Deer

More by this poet

Let Them Not Say

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

Words

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