Saturday, May 16, 2009

An Equal and Opposite Poem

Could it be that for every poem there is an equal and opposite poem? And could it be that we, ideally, live in the balance, the teeter totter, the pendulum dance, the mother's rocking, cradling arms, of both poems? Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth?
Let's try it. To balance
"Do not go gentle into that good night
But rage, rage against the dying of the light",
we have Robert Frost's lovely:
"Acceptance
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night bee too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be."

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