This is a poem from that time that I go back to,
partly because of some of the ones
I want to read later, because it seems kind of connected with.
I think I've been talking rather too much about the relation
of our individual lives and what, for really
for want of a real word, we call the natural world.
And one can get carried away and talk only about it
as though it was something out there instead of as though it
were something in here.
And one of the marvelous things about those poems of Zbigniew
Herbert's that we were talking about today,
is the way the one suddenly keeps turning into the other.
I think this happens in poetry all the time, if you go back.
And I think this is something that we may be
on the verge of rediscovering.
I hope so.
But, this is a poem that I wrote, oh, 20 years ago,
I suppose.
And it was looking back to a time, quite some time,
about that, before that.
It's called "The River of Bees."
"In a dream, I returned to the river of bees.
Five orange trees by the bridge and beside, two mills,
my house, into whose courtyard a blind man followed the goats
and stood singing of what was older.
Soon it will be 15 years.
He was old.
He will have fallen into his eyes.
I took my eyes a long way to the calendars,
room after room, asking, how shall I live?
One of the ends is made of streets.
One-man processions carry through it
empty bottles, their image of hope.
It was offered to me by name.
Once, once, and once, in the same city I was born, asking,
what shall I say?
He will have fallen into his mouth.
Men think they are better than grass.
I returned to his voice, rising like a forkful of hay.
He was old.
He is not real.
Nothing is real, nor the noise of death drawing water.
We are the echo of the future.
On the door it says what to do to survive.
But we were not born to survive, only to live."