Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, WHAT SPIRIT?, by ALICE MONKS MEARS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

WHAT SPIRIT?, by                    
First Line: What spirit do I house?
Last Line: Within the silence of the seed.
Subject(s): Death; Love; Rest; Spirituality; Dead, The


What spirit do I house?
It drinks no ease of night,
the starred wine-bowl. It wakes
restless still when the dawn-wave breaks
in crested gold-flaked light
around the anchored mountains' prows.

What was its other name,
what its surmise of death,
that (unbidden by the mind)
night and day it must search to find
beyond ''the Lord God saith''
some knowledge hid in flint and flame?

It flees the hungry sense
which color, texture, sound
can fill and fill again.
Shall spirit need no beauty then,
feeling a hunger more profound,
glimpsing fulfillment more intense?

I do not know its need.
I know it does not rest.
Yet once it paused, nor stirred,
listening to love — as though it heard
half-answer to its earth-doomed quest
within the silence of the seed.




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