Well, so much for Sylvia.
And the other poem that I was asked to read,
which I'll read next is--
it has one link with the Soviet poems.
And that is it is a projection into the life of another,
in this case into the life of a tree.
Just have to get a handkerchief.
[INAUDIBLE CHATTER] I'm not drinking soup.
[LAUGHTER]
Good soup, mind you.
Good soup but-- so this poem which I'm about to read
is spoken by a tree.
A tree who encountered Orpheus.
And you know that Orpheus, as well as
enchanting men and animals, also caused trees and other plants
to follow him.
White dawn.
Stillness.
When the rippling began, I took it
for sea wind coming to our valley
with rumors of salt of treeless horizons.
But the white fog didn't stir.
The leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving, yet the rippling drew nearer
and then my own outermost branches
began to tingle almost as if fire
had been lit below them too close
and their twig tips were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only deeply alert.
I was the first to see him for I grew out on the pasture slope
beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed, the two moving stems
the short trunk, the two arm branches flexible,
each with five leafless twigs at their ends.
And the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass bearing
a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of some cut branch bent
while it was green, strands of a vine tight stretched across it.
From this when he touched it and from his voice which
unlike the wind's voice had no need of our leaves and branches
to complete its sound came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple
he had come near and stopped in my first shadow,
it was a wave that bathed me as if rain
rose from below and around me instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling.
I seemed to be singing as he sang.
I seemed to know what the lark knows.
All my sap was mounting towards the sun that by now had risen.
The mist was rising, the grass was
drying yet my roots felt music moisten them deep under Earth.
He came still closer, leaned on my trunk, the bark thrilled
like a leaf still-folded.
Music.
There was no twig of me not trembling with joy and fear.
Then as he sang it was no longer sounds only that made
the music, he spoke and as no tree listens, I listened,
and language came into my roots out of the Earth.
Into my bark, out of the air.
Into the pores of my greenest shoots, gently as dew,
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys: of where sun and moon go while we stand
in dark, of an Earth journey he dreamed he would take someday,
deeper than roots.
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words.
Ah, it seemed my thick bark would
split like a sapling's that grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost warms it.
Fire, he sang, the trees' fear, and I, a tree,
rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre--
now I knew its name--
were both frost and fire, its chords
flamed up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
And at the heart of my wood (so close I
was to becoming man or a God) there
was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
something akin to what men call boredom.
Something, the poem descending a scale, a stream over stones,
that gives to a candle a coldness in the midst
of its burning, he said.
It was then when in the blaze of his power
that reached me and changed me I thought
I should fall my length, that the singer began to leave me,
slowly moved from my noon shadow to open
light, words leaping and dancing over his shoulders back to me,
reverie sweep of lyre tones becoming slowly again ripple.
And I in terror but not in doubt of what
I must do, in anguish, in haste, wrenched from the Earth root
after root, the soil heaving and cracking,
the moss tearing asunder.
And behind me the others, my brothers, forgotten since dawn.
In the forest they too had heard and were pulling their roots
in pain out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away, breaking themselves out of their depths.
You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing, so dreadful the storm
sounds were where there was no storm,
no wind but the rush of our branches moving,
our trunks breasting the air.
But the music, the music reached us.
Clumsily, stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves in answer, we moved, we followed.
All day we followed up hill and down.
We learned to dance.
For he would stop where the ground was flat
and words he said taught us to leap and to wind
in and out around one another.
In figures the lyre's measure designed.
The singer laughed till he wept to see us.
He was so glad.
At sunset we came to this place I stand in,
this knoll with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
In the last light of that day, his song became farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun dried roots back into Earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music
so quiet we could almost not hear it in the moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since.
In our new life we have waited, he does not return.
It is said he made his Earth journey
and lost what he sought.
It is said they felled him and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said his head still sang and was swept out
to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel as our rings increase, something
that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest leaf
tips further.
The wind, the birds do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony and the way we danced, the music!
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.