Elegy With A Chimneysweep Falling Inside It
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
One by one, above the schoolyard.
If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:
A bird would still be riding the back of a horse,
And the horse would go on grazing in a field, & the gleaners,
At one with the land, the wind, the sun examining
Their faces, would go on working,
Each moment forgotten in the swipe of a scythe.
But the walls of the labyrinth have already acquired
Their rose tint from the blood of slaves
Crushed into the stone used to build them, & the windows
Of stained glass are held in place by the shriek
And sighing body of a falling chimneysweep through
The baked & blackened air. This ash was once a village,
That snowflake, time itself.
But until the day it is permitted to curl up in a doorway,
And try to sleep, the snow falling just beyond it,
There’s nothing for it to do:
The soul rests its head in its hands & stares out
From its desk at the trash-littered schoolyard,
It stays where it was left.
When the window fills with pain, the soul bears witness,
But it doesn’t write. Nor does it write home
Having no need to, having no home.
[...] Read more
poem by Larry Levis
Added by Poetry Lover
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