Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SIFTING MY DREAMS, by MURIEL STRODE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SIFTING MY DREAMS, by                    
First Line: I have come to confess to the hyacinth, to seek absolution
Last Line: That my lot should be so sweet!
Subject(s): God


I

I have come to confess to the hyacinths, to seek absolution from the wisteria, I
have come to be forgiven of the roses, for I have outraged Beauty.
I made an ash-girl of her, that one with the star-eyes.
I set her in rags, that one of the tremulousness.
I beat her with flails of ugliness, that one of the ravished flesh, that pressed
the star-strands to her breast, and drank, like goblets of delirium, great
draughts of the night-fragrant air.

II

God possess me! Express through me as through the hues of your flowers, the
songs of your starlings.
Vest me with brilliant hues, or with carols.
Let me be some color of your soul, some sound of your uttering.

Let me be some rapture of you -- some uttered ecstasy --
Like sap thrilling through trees,
Like stars rising to perihelion,
Like waves lapping the feet of cliffs,
Like fledglings pressed close to a breast,
Like azaeleas opening,
Like moonflowers thrown purple against a blue night.

III

I am the spinner of dream,
I weave from the webs of yearning.
I weave from the fragile reel that holds the fine red threads of my heart.

I am the gentle dreamer, weaving in and out a warp of the moon with a woof of
the mist;
Fine wrought threads of gauze, with filament of dew;
Strands of fairy tresses enwoven with a blue shimmering, like a grotto's
evening.

Somewhere my dream awaits me --
What matter that I had the wrong personnel.
Maybe I called it Hyacinth, when it was Star-Drift;
Maybe I called it the East Wind, when it was the Moonmist.

IV

I bring you the purple embroideries wrought in the black Pentecost of my pain.
I bring all that life missed and lay it at your feet like friendly grasses.
I bring the tenderness that speaks your name fondly,
I bring the atonement and the reparation, annulling the world experience.
I reestablish the Great Heart, I re-affirm the Great Potency.
All that was withheld I bring.
I bring seed to the barren fields, and birds to the restive trees.
I bring flocks to the bare hills, and lovers to the moonlight.

V

I bring you up to the tablelands of your soul,
To the undenied landscape and the deep inhalations,
To your thatched house of joy, with its radiating cornices, and its lintels that
laugh,
Into a garden where trees clap their hands.

I bring you in the early ecstasy, with dew on the spirit, in the birds'
awakening,
In the early radiance, to the vision that hangs in the sky,
To the things you saw on the wide plain's distances.

I bring you singing life,
Setting it all to music --
From the lullaby over the cradle,
To the requiem over the grave.

VI

I moan at the water's edge at night,
I press my heart to the pond lilies,
I call my lover's name.
I hear the answer of the moonlight, and the birds chirping in the trees.
I hear him call to me out of the lone wind.
I hear his swift unwilling feet go speeding by.
I reach my hand to touch the edge of his garment,
I reach my heart to touch the edge of his grief.

VII

I am braiding oakum with my long deft fingers,
But my soul is braiding filament,
Caught from the strands of stars.

I am sifting ashes,
And you do not know that I am also sifting my dreams.
You see only Cinderella, the ash-girl,
But I see the bride of the prince.

VIII

Once I prayed to come in the victorious concourse --
Now I know that victory is not in the pageant and the roll of bugles,
It is not in the helmets, not in the clanking steel,
Not in the prancing spirit of the fete day.
It may be tears, not paeans.
Once I prayed to the young God of daring -- now I pray to the grave God of
experience,
To that God that bears no crowning and no bay.

IX

What if I grew only towering pines out of my breast, and never grew the violets,
shy in the grass?
What if I brought only great granite boulders, and never brought the moss?

X

I stand at the source, at the beginning, and tell you what was put into the
attar jars;
What pigments were mixed for beetles.
I tell you the process for the inside of conch shells.
I am from His workshop, and I tell you how He lathed the world,
How with plane and plummet He scoped the sea.
I know how He made trees, and how stars came to be.
I am of the Divine Order of His Blue Blouse --
I carried timbers and wielded trowels.
I am co-builder with God of His worlds.

XI

I pray to the God that made seas and sunsets and mountain ranges --
And the God that made mites and microcosms.
Only a God of infinities can understand infinitesimals.
Only a God that uttered the unendingness that thunders along the walls of ages,
can hear the pigmy cry of me.
Only the timeless, measureless One will be concerned with the moaning of
moments.
A lesser God might hear the cry of a star, but the God-One hears my cry,
Hears the agony of the dust,
The pain of the unassembling.

XII

O God, keep me humble! --
Let me not boast my cross, my Calvary Hill.
What have I done that I should be identified with saviors,
Should share fate with these?
Should bleed and die, pinioned by my hands and feet?
O God, keep me humble, here with Joan and Jesus --
That my lot should be so sweet!





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