The Winter of Listening
by David Whyte
No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.
All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.
What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.
What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,
what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.
What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.
All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.
All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.
All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.
So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.
“The Winter of Listening” by David Whyte, from The House of Belonging. © Many Rivers Press, 1997.
Photography Credit: Detail from “Seeking Warmth”: A Kashmiri man warms his hands over a fire on a street on a cold morning in Srinagar, India,” by Fayaz Kabli/Reuters.
Poem and photograph found on A Year of Being Here: daily mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now.
Teresa-
Just read Roethke’s “Praise to the End” with special thoughts of Jeff Metcalf’s recent demise.
Is Roethke’s poetry among your favorites? The genre has been an undernourished element of my education and life until recently. Frost and Ogden Nash excepted. Time to do something about that!
Jack
L. Jackson Newell
2568 Elizabeth St. #8
Salt Lake City UT 84106
801/556-1008
Jack, I’m not well versed (no pun intended) in poetry, though every time I dip my toe in, I find myself swimming in mystical and strangely curative waters. Serious writing is mindfulness incarnate, and poetry by form perhaps the richest distillation. I have not read much Roethke, though am encouraged to do so by your note. But I have been blessed by his lineage, especially in his students Dick Hugo, who had died the year before I got to Montana but still held great effect over the writing program there, and William Pitt Root, who was a professor and became, with his wife, poet Pam Uschuck, a good friend. Bill told me a story about Roethke once that has always stayed with me. Roethke’s transcendent connection with nature included, as one critic wrote about Praise to the End, a “beautiful sense of the lives of small creatures,” and one day he told his class at the University of Washington that if you couldn’t write a poem about a banana slug, a ubiquitous presence in that clime, you weren’t really a poet. Bill thought at the time: well, maybe I should get a day job. But years later, after he had become an esteemed poet himself, he was in his hotel room before a reading and had turned the TV on to a nature program. As it happened, it featured a segment on slugs making love. Bill was so entranced, and so anxious to write a poem, that he almost missed his own reading. When he returned to the room that evening, he penned “Slugs Amorous in the Air,” a stunningly beautiful and erotic poem. You can read it here.