Robert Bly Page

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The Robert Bly Page

from Silence in the Snowy Fields

The Poem "Silence" by Robert Bly

 

The fall has come, clear as the eyes of chickens.

Strange muffled sounds come from the sea,

Sounds of muffled oarlocks,

And swamping in lonely bays,

Surf crashing on unchristened shores,

And the wash of tiny snail shells in the wandering gravel.

 

My body also wanders among these doorposts and cars,

Cradling a pen, or walking down a stair

Holding a cup in my hand,

And not breaking into the pastures that lie in the sunlight.

This is the sloth of the man inside the body,

The sloth of the body lost among the wandering stones of

kindness.

 

Something homeless is looking on the long roads ---

A dog lost since midnight, a small duck

Among the odorous reeds,

Or a tiny box-elder bug searching for the window pane.

Even the young sunlight is lost on the window pane,

Moving at night like a diver among the bare branches

silently lying on the floor.

 

--by Robert Bly

from the book Silence in the Snowy Fields: Poems by Robert Bly

Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1965.

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