A Grain of Mustard Seed Read online

  The Viking Press, Inc. 1962, p. 5.

  1

  There are times when

  I think only of killing

  The voracious animal

  Who is my perpetual shame,

  The violent one

  Whose raging demands

  Break down peace and shelter

  Like a peacock’s scream.

  There are times when

  I think only of how to do away

  With this brute power

  That cannot be tamed.

  I am the cage where poetry

  Paces and roars. The beast

  Is the god. How murder the god?

  How live with the terrible god?

  2

  The Kingdom of Kali

  Anguish is always there, lurking at night,

  Wakes us like a scourge, the creeping sweat

  As rage is remembered, self-inflicted blight.

  What is it in us we have not mastered yet?

  What Hell have we made of the subtle weaving

  Of nerve with brain, that all centers tear?

  We live in a dark complex of rage and grieving.

  The machine grates, grates, whatever we are.

  The kingdom of Kali is within us deep.

  The built-in destroyer, the savage goddess,

  Wakes in the dark and takes away our sleep.

  She moves through the blood to poison gentleness.

  She keeps us from being what we long to be;

  Tenderness withers under her iron laws.

  We may hold her like a lunatic, but it is she

  Held down, who bloodies with her claws.

  How then to set her free or come to terms

  With the volcano itself, the fierce power

  Erupting injuries, shrieking alarms?

  Kali among her skulls must have her hour.

  It is time for the invocation, to atone

  For what we fear most and have not dared to face:

  Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown;

  We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place.

  Every creation is born out of the dark.

  Every birth is bloody. Something gets torn.

  Kali is there to do her sovereign work

  Or else the living child will be still-born.

  She cannot be cast out (she is here for good)

  Nor battled to the end. Who wins that war?

  She cannot be forgotten, jailed, or killed.

  Heaven must still be balanced against her.

  Out of destruction she comes to wrest

  The juice from the cactus, its harsh spine,

  And until she, the destroyer, has been blest,

  There will be no child, no flower, and no wine.

  3

  The Concentration Camps

  Have we managed to fade them out like God?

  Simply eclipse the unpurged images?

  Eclipse the children with a mountain of shoes?

  Let the bones fester like animal bones,

  False teeth, bits of hair, spilled liquid eyes,

  Disgusting, not to be looked at, like a blight?

  Ages ago we closed our hearts to blight.

  Who believes now? Who cries, “merciful God”?

  We gassed God in the ovens, great piteous eyes,

  Burned God in a trash-heap of images,

  Refused to make a compact with dead bones,

  And threw away the children with their shoes—

  Millions of sandals, sneakers, small worn shoes—

  Thrust them aside as a disgusting blight.

  Not ours, this death, to take into our bones,

  Not ours a dying mutilated God.

  We freed our minds from gruesome images,

  Pretended we had closed their open eyes

  That never could be closed, dark puzzled eyes,

  The ghosts of children who went without shoes

  Naked toward the ovens’ bestial images,

  Strangling for breath, clawing the blight,

  Piled up like pigs beyond the help of God…

  With food in our stomachs, flesh on our bones,

  We turned away from the stench of bones,

  Slept with the living, drank in sexy eyes,

  Hurried for shelter from a murdered God.

  New factories turned out millions of shoes.

  We hardly noticed the faint smell of blight,

  Stuffed with new cars, ice cream, rich images.

  But no grass grew on the raw images.

  Corruption mushroomed from decaying bones.

  Joy disappeared. The creature of the blight

  Rose in the cities, dark smothered eyes.

  Our children danced with rage in their shoes,

  Grew up to question who had murdered God,

  While we evaded their too attentive eyes,

  Walked the pavane of death in our new shoes,

  Sweated with anguish and remembered God.

  4

  The Time of Burning

  For a long time we shall have only to listen,

  Not argue or defend, but listen to each other.

  Let curses fall without intercession,

  Let those fires burn we have tried to smother.

  What we have pushed aside and tried to bury

  Lives with a staggering thrust we cannot parry.

  We have to reckon with Kali for better or worse,

  The angry tongue that lashes us with flame

  As long-held hope turns bitter and men curse,

  “Burn, baby, burn” in the goddess’ name.

  We are asked to bear it, to take in the whole,

  The long indifferent beating down of soul.

  It is the time of burning, hate exposed.

  We shall have to live with only Kali near.

  She comes in her fury, early or late, disposed

  To tantrums we have earned and must endure.

  We have to listen to the harsh undertow

  To reach the place where Kali can bestow.

  But she must have her dreadful empire first

  Until the prisons of the mind are broken free

  And every suffering center at its worst

  Can be appealed to her dark mystery.

  She comes to purge the altars in her way,

  And at her altar we shall have to pray.

  It is a place of skulls, a deathly place

  Where we confront our violence and feel,

  Before that broken and self-ravaged face,

  The murderers we are, brought here to kneel.

  5

  It is time for the invocation:

  Kali, be with us.

  Violence, destruction, receive our homage.

  Help us to bring darkness into the light,

  To lift out the pain, the anger,

  Where it can be seen for what it is—

  The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.

  Put the wild hunger where it belongs,

  Within the act of creation,

  Crude power that forges a balance

  Between hate and love.

  Help us to be the always hopeful

  Gardeners of the spirit

  Who know that without darkness

  Nothing comes to birth

  As without light

  Nothing flowers.

  Bear the roots in mind,

  You, the dark one, Kali,

  Awesome power.

  After the Tiger

  We have been struck by a lightning force

  And roaring like beasts we have been caught

  Exulting, bloody, glad to destroy and curse.

  The tiger, violence, takes the human throat,

  Glad of the blood, glad of the lust

  In this jungle of action without will,

  Where we can tear down what we hate at last.

  That tiger strength—oh it is beautiful!

  There is no effort. It is all success.

  It fee
ls like a glorious creation.

  An absolute, it knows no more or less,

  Cannot be worked at, is nothing but sensation.

  That is its awful power, so like release

  The animal within us roars its joy.

  What other god could give us this wild peace

  As we run out, tumultuous to destroy?

  But when the tiger goes, we are alone,

  Sleeping the madness off until some dawn

  When human eyes wake, huge and forlorn,

  To meet the human face that has been torn.

  Who was a tiger once is weak and small,

  And terribly unfit for all he has to do.

  Lifting a single stone up from the rubble

  Takes all his strength. And he hurts too.

  Who is a friend here, who an enemy?

  Each face he meets is the same savaged face

  Recovering itself and marked by mystery.

  There is no power left in this sad place—

  Only the light of dawn and its cold shadow.

  How place a cool hand on some burning head?

  Even compassion is still dazed and raw.

  The simplest gesture grates a way toward need.

  After the violence peace does not rise

  Like a forgiving sun to wash all clean,

  Nor does it rush out like some fresh surmise

  Without a thought for what the wars have been.

  “I too am torn” or “Where is your hurt?”

  The answer may be only silences.

  The ghostly tiger lives on in the heart.

  Wounds sometimes do not heal for centuries.

  So the peace-maker must dig wells and build

  Small shelters stone by stone, often afraid;

  Must live with a long patience not to yield.

  Only destruction wields a lightning blade.

  After the tiger we become frail and human,

  The dust of ruins acrid in the throat.

  Oh brothers, take it as an absolution

  That we must work so slowly toward hope!

  “We’ll To The Woods No More,

  The Laurels Are Cut Down”

  (At Kent State)

  The war games are over,

  The laurels all cut down.

  We’ll to the woods no more

  With live ammunition

  To murder our own children

  Because they hated war.

  The war games are over.

  How many times in pain

  We were given a choice—

  “Sick of the violence”

  (Oh passionate human voice!)—

  But buried it again.

  The war games are over.

  Virile, each stood alone—

  John, Robert, Martin Luther.

  Still we invoke the gun,

  Still make a choice for murder,

  Bury the dead again.

  The war games are over,

  And all the laurel’s gone.

  Dead warrior, dead lover,

  Was the war lost or won?

  What say you, blasted head?

  No answer from the dead.

  Night Watch

  1

  Sweet night nursing a neighbor—

  The old lady lifts her hands

  And writes a message

  On the air—

  Gently I lay them down.

  Sudden motion

  Might shift the bandage

  Over one eye.

  Across the hall

  A woman moans twice.

  I alone am not in pain,

  Wide-awake under a circle of light.

  Two days ago in Kentucky

  I was the sick child,

  Sick for this patchy, barren earth,

  For tart talk,

  Dissatisfaction,

  Sharp bitter laughter,

  Sick for a granite pillow.

  Among that grass soft as silk,

  Those courtesies, those evasions,

  I was sick as a trout

  In a stagnant pond.

  Wide-awake,

  I weigh one thing against another.

  The old lady will see

  Better than before;

  The woman who moaned

  Sleeps herself whole again.

  Sweet, innocent night

  In the hospital

  Where wounds can be healed!

  2

  The birds sing

  Before dawn,

  And before dawn

  I begin to see a little.

  I hold the old warm hand in mine

  To keep it from clawing

  The bandage,

  And to comfort me.

  I am happy as a mother

  Whose good baby sleeps.

  In Kentucky

  They are spurned mothers,

  Curse the children

  And their hot black eyes,

  Hard from not weeping;

  Remember the old days,

  Dear pickaninnies,

  Mouths pink as watermelon.

  What happens

  When the baby screams,

  Batters the barred cage of its bed,

  Wears patience thin?

  What happens

  When the baby is six feet tall,

  Throws stones,

  Breaks windows?

  What happens

  When the grown man

  Beats out against us

  His own hard core,

  Wants to hurt?

  In the white night

  At the hospital

  I listened hard.

  I weighed one thing

  Against another.

  I heard, “Love, love.”

  (Love them to death?)

  And at dawn I heard a voice,

  “If you love them,

  Let them grow.”

  3

  The convalescent

  Is quick to weak rage

  Or tears;

  In a state of growth

  We are in pain,

  Violent, hard to live with.

  Our wounds ache.

  We curse rather than bless.

  4

  “I hate them,” she said.

  “They spoil everything,” said

  The woman from Baltimore.

  “It is not the dear old town

  I used to know.”

  I felt pain like an assault,

  The old pain again

  When the world thrusts itself inside,

  When we have to take in the outside,

  When we have to decide

  To be crazy-human with hope

  Or just plain crazy

  With fear.

  (The drunken Black in the subway

  Will rape you, white woman,

  Because you had bad dreams.)

  Stomach pain, or vomit it.

  In Kentucky I threw up

  One whole night.

  Get rid of this great sick baby

  We carry around

  Or go through the birth-sweat again.

  Lazy heart,

  Slow self-indulgent beat,

  Take the sick world in.

  5

  In Baltimore

  The Black who drove me to the airport

  Seemed an enormous, touchable

  Blessing.

  “When you give a speech,” he told me,

  “And you get that scared feeling,

  Take a deep breath. It helps.”

  Comfort flowed out from him.

  He talked about pain

  In terms of healing.

  Of Baltimore, that great hospital

  Where the wounds fester

  Among azaleas and dogwood,

  The lovely quiet gardens,

  “We are making things happen,”

  Said the black man.

  “It is going to be beautiful.”

  He had no doubt.

  Wide awake in the hospital

  In th
e morning light,

  I weighed one thing against the other.

  I took a deep breath.

  Part Two

  Proteus

  They were intense people, given to migraine,

  Outbursts of arrogance, self-pity, or wild joy,

  Affected by the weather like a weathervane,

  Hungry for glory, exhausted by each day,

  Humble at night and filled with self-distrust.

  Time burned their heels. They ran because they must—

  Sparkled, spilled over in the stress of living.

  Oh, they were fickle, fluid, sometimes cruel,

  Who still imagined they were always giving;

  And the mind burned experience like fuel,

  So they were sovereign losers, clumsy winners,

  And read the saints, and knew themselves as sinners.

  Wild blood subdued, it was pure form they blest.

  Their sunlit landscapes were painted across pain.

  They dreamed of peaceful gardens and of rest—

  And now their joys, their joys alone remain.

  Transparent, smiling, like calm gods to us,

  Their names are Mozart, Rilke—Proteus.

  A Last Word

  (for my students at Wellesley College)

  Whatever we found in that room was not easy,

  But harder and harder, and for me as well,

  Fumbling for words when what we fumbled for

  Could not be spoken, the crude source itself;

  The clever people had no news to tell.

  The best failed. That is the way it is.

  The best knew what we were mining after

  Was not to be reached or counted in an hour.

  The worst poems, maybe, became fertile,

  And we knew moments of pure crazy laughter.

  Often you came into that room becalmed,

  Your faces buttoned against the afternoon.

  If the hour occasionally opened into trees,

  If we digressed, leaving the subject flat,

  Well, we were fighting hard against the gloom.

  The vivid battle brought us within the hour

  Out of the doldrums together, edged and warm.

  At any instant the fall of a mask

  Released some naked wisdom; an open face

  Surprised itself and took our world by storm.

  For you, I trust, the time was never wasted;

  For me, driven to dig deep under my cover,

  Into the unsafe places where poets operate,