By W.S. Merwin.
When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering space
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven
Ah, Merwin gets it…
To use a Bengali idiom, “my soul fills up.”
Simply beautiful.
Wow, I am glad to see that Merwin gets this. This poem really suggests a lot of grand philisophical questions that aren’t usually considered by poets, but then again, science is becoming a more accepted field for metaphor in poetry. Still, this is one of the more prescient I’ve read.