"As long as you catch what you've thrown yourself"
As long as you catch what you've thrown yourself, it's all
just clever agility and venial gain;
but when you suddenly come to catch a ball
an eternal playmate has thrown
at you, at your center, has exactly set
in mastered motion, in an arc
out of God's great bridge-building -
then that you catch is real power:
not yours, the world's. And when you even
have the strength to throw it back,
no, better yet: have forgotten courage and strength
and thrown it back already...(the way the year
throws birds, the flocks of migrating birds
hurled over the ocean from an old to a new
warmth - ) then, that gamble, is the first moment
you too can be said to play. You
unburden yourself of the throw no longer; you burden
yourself with the throw no longer. Out of your hands steps
the meteor and it races into its skies...
but when you suddenly come to catch a ball
an eternal playmate has thrown
at you, at your center, has exactly set
in mastered motion, in an arc
out of God's great bridge-building -
then that you catch is real power:
not yours, the world's. And when you even
have the strength to throw it back,
no, better yet: have forgotten courage and strength
and thrown it back already...(the way the year
throws birds, the flocks of migrating birds
hurled over the ocean from an old to a new
warmth - ) then, that gamble, is the first moment
you too can be said to play. You
unburden yourself of the throw no longer; you burden
yourself with the throw no longer. Out of your hands steps
the meteor and it races into its skies...
(1922)
I owe this great poem's being here to the esteemed Kay Parry, into whose Melbourne poetry group it was bravely introduced.
ReplyDeleteThis poem is driving The Indy 500 in my head. Lap after lap, each one different, yet the start and the end meet in the same place. Thank you for the full publication.
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