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Four Reflections - on Eliot's Four Quartets
Heart
of Light
Poet in Residence at the 3rd London Poetry Festival 2007
I
I tread over the dust.
The moon drops onto the earth
drawing the waves and the wind.
The levanter lures its tales,
a whispering cloak for the water.
These stories cannot be spoken, cannot be heard,
they may only be known.
Known by those who quiet their minds
silent.
Long enough to feel their chatter, to see through a mist…
the other.
The other who stands on a shadowed shore
expanding
with the sounds of the sand drinking the sea.
The other on a peninsula of calm
eyes gazing across miles.
Boundaries shiver, insubstantial in this place.
I reach the sea's edge
streams of light lick over and…
I am home.
Far from that place. Far from those faces. Those things.
Yet…
I am home.
It cannot endure, it is merely a reflection but,
in one pure, painful second…
I am home.
But this home, does not belong to me.
It's not mine.
Not yet.
II
And turning from the fading sounds of hushed footsteps
the other, another
drinks down the…second
savoring its aftertaste before it evaporates
in reality's heated breath.
Never to have existed.
III
And walking across the lazy earth,
the dry, stretching earth, yawning its limbs across the years.
The other.
Another, gazes across the walking moments… of a waking eternity.
IV
You can never be whole, until you are broken.
Never be one until you lie, a fleck,
a grain on the skin
of the endless
expanse of eternity.
Sinking
into the earth.
Sinking
with the weight of a drift of seconds
that accumulate
as a deep drift of leaden snow.
And the galgos steps across the paper strewn stone
Down into the city
down onto the shrinking world.
( This poem was included in the London Poetry Pearl Anthology, published
in celebration of the fifth year of The London Poetry Festival 2008)
Copyrights @ Briony Dennis
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