Towards what loveliness

Towards what loveliness
does the day turn. A breath comes once again
of a new being: as into the air climb songs,
a palette of colours at a symposium,
a feast of voices: now a blind speaking-in-tongues
of sky-shades, up for discussion in the brain;
or sea-shades, deep notes of a harmonium;
or earth-shades, strangely syllabled in a texture
of all designs and none in an admixture
of anybody’s guess.

Towards what loveliness
the day returns. And we, for all our science,
our volumes, all our word-magnificence –
what do we know? What can we ever say
of each day’s conversation in the round?
What shade, what speech, what singing of the day
is understood? I speak of nothing else
but the dawn’s light, and what the light reveals.
There is a flowering impulse that has crowned
what was a wilderness.

Towards what loveliness
does the day turn, as we two meet again.
The dark is near: we shall take nothing for granted:
nor is it true the great day of the past
did not flame out with so much that was wanted.
Yet now a new time comes. We shall outlast
its firstling rays: and a new hubbub shall come
to sound, in a free tune of Nature’s refrain:
in the whale’s song, and the gnat’s whine, and the bees’ hum;
and human speech, no less.