Halfway to Silence: Poems In SuffolkMourning my old ways, guilt fills the mind,As memories well up from ripening goldAnd I look far away over tilted landWatching splashed light and shadow on the foldWhere restless clouds flock over and disband.To what have I been faithful in the end?What lover loved forever well or ill?As clouds come over to darken a line of treesAnd then far off shadow a wooded hill,I have to answer, “faithful only to these,To earth itself turning toward the fall,To earth’s relentless changing mysteries.”All lovers sow and reap their harvests fromThis flesh ever to be renewed and reconceivedAs the bright ploughs break open the dark loam.Whatever the cost and whatever I believed,Only the earth itself, great honeycomb,Gives comfort to the many times bereaved.Whatever cloud comes over with black rainTo make my life seem of so little worth,To cover the bright gold with guilt and pain,The poem, life itself, labor of birthHas been forced back again and againTo find renewal in the fertile earth.Fidelity to what?
