INCANTATION

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

 

Intimation

A conversation partitions a table.
A girl stares into her brew.
A mother frets about her daughter
drinking and not wearing
makeup.

I know how babies are made
and unmade.

Sign language is beautiful and invincible.
Every word moves hands and fingers
and sometimes eyebrows and lips, too.

Reason is cultivated like flowers
in a window box.

I know that you
sing to these flowers.

At a crosswalk
a look into the eyes of a man
at the wheel of a steel and glass machine
stops him from running you down.

Once in a while in the morning
you water them.

The action that makes a husband
and wife one can also unite
a master and his slave girl.

All men are created equal.

Movement does not disturb the universe --
it constitutes it
like wind over water
seen through the eyes of fish.

Do more than breathe life into a poem.
One whirling person can keep the world upright.

 

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Incantation is by Czeslaw Milosz. Intimation is from whispers
Douglas Galbi heard while chanting
Incantation.