Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Secret by Denise Levertov

The Secret
By Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dear Poems
By Marion

Dear Poems:
You give me sustenance,
breath
heartbeat.

You give my life
color,
depth,
dimension.

You are, I know,
my raison d'etre &
my silence amidst
chaos

I love you.

6/29/08

8 comments:

Kelly said...

Can't go wrong with Denise Levertov!

I really like your love letter to poetry. :)

Ben Ditty said...

I can never quite get over how amazing your blog's style is. BUT I love poetry too and your poem :)

erin said...

it's like a hard new kind of oxygen, isn't it, that the body not only needs, but is driven by? poetry! yes to both you and Denise! yes!

xo
erin

Bubba said...

Poems are your happy place! :)

Marion said...

Thank, Kelly. I appreciate you! xo

Ben, you just plain ROCK. You always make me feel great. xo

Erin, yes. You know even more than even I do how much we breathe poetry. xo

Bubba, you hit the nail on the head. xo

Unspoken said...

my silence amidst chaos

Nice! This is how I feel about words written

Margaret Pangert said...

I love your ode to poetry, Marion! And your own poems give that same sustenance right back to me.
I just finished a novel called After Dark by Haruki Murakami which reminded me so much of Denise Levertov's The Secret. Murakami depicts two sisters who have a link, lose it for a very long time, then re-discover it. There is an omniscient point-of-view "tech-eye" that seems to be present here, too. You always have something to ponder over, Marion! Thanks for you!

* said...

Levertov, definitely and in this, even more.