It is the cave of me, its emptiness,
Which hollows your own imperfections free.
The echo shapes a shadowed tenderness,
Where absence learns the art of memory.
Yet in the damp, where silence clings like stone,
A fragile nymph stirs restlessly unseen;
It dreams of wings it cannot call its own,
A shimmer waiting where the dark has been.
And so it breaks — the thin skin of the past,
Shedding the weight of oldness in the night;
The cave dissolves, its hold undone at last,
A body glimmers, born of hidden flight.
Innocent now, it hovers, fierce and small,
A dragonfly that knows no cave at all.
The original Poem
The Cave of Me
That hollows your own imperfections free.
As if in the darkness of the internal soul
The streams of pure beauty flow like
Glistening rivulets procreant in unfathomed
Grottoes.
The dragonfly was once
A grub in that darkness. We never
See his emergence. We see him skate and skim
And fly free, and have never seen the painful
Miracle of the shedding of oldness in darkness;
Thus, we were not given to that vision, the
Knowledge of which is too much to bear.
We were given to be like the dragonfly
Innocent and flying free.
A grub in that darkness. We never
See his emergence. We see him skate and skim
And fly free, and have never seen the painful
Miracle of the shedding of oldness in darkness;
Thus, we were not given to that vision, the
Knowledge of which is too much to bear.
We were given to be like the dragonfly
Innocent and flying free.
October 1972
