“to touch is to heal, to hurt is to steal / if you want to kiss the sky better learn how to kneel”

For Poetry Monday, is it time for more Frost? It’s time for more Frost:


A Loose Mountain, Robert Frost

(Telescopic)

Did you stay up last night (the Magi did)
To see the star shower known as Leonid
That once a year by hand or apparatus
Is so mysteriously pelted at us?
It is but fiery puffs of dust and pebbles,
No doubt directed at our heads as rebels
In having taken artificial light
Against the ancient sovereignty of night.
A fusillade of blanks and empty flashes,
It never reaches earth except as ashes
Of which you feel no least touch on your face
Nor find in dew the slightest cloudy trace.
Nevertheless it constitutes a hint
That the loose mountain lately seen to glint
In sunlight near us in momentous swing
Is something in a Balearic sling
The heartless and enormous Outer Black
Is still withholding in the Zodiac
But from irresolution in his back
About when best to have us in our orbit,
So we won’t simply take it and absorb it.


Originally published in A Witness Tree (1942). The subtitle plays off a poem slightly earlier in the collection, subtitled (Microscopic).

---L.

Subject quote from Mysterious Ways, U2.