A Question
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
~ Robert Frost. Text from Archive.org
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"Imagines mortis the dance of death 0102 The creation of Eve The fall of man PK-P-127.375 - recto" by Holbein, Hans (1497-1543) is licensed under CC BY 4.0. |
Matins
Unreachable father, when we were first
exiled from heaven, you made
a replica, a place in one sense
different from heaven, being
designed to teach a lesson: otherwise
the same--beauty on either side, beauty
without alternative--Except
we didn't know what was the lesson. Left alone,
we exhausted each other. Years
of darkness followed; we took turns
working in the garden, the first tears
filling our eyes as earth
misted with petals, some
dark red, some flesh colored--
We never thought of you
whom we were learning to worship.
We merely knew it wasn't human nature to love
only what returns love.
~ Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (London: Carcanet, 1992), p 3
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