POEMS ABOUT ALONENESS ...

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

 

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice---- though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried. But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world

determined to do

the only thing you could do----

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

 

Deeper Than Love

There is love, and it is a deep thing

but there are deeper things than love.

First and last, man is alone.

He is born alone, and alone he dies

and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.

But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives

alone

amd deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy

and alone.

Love is a thing of twoness.

But underneath any twoness, man is alone.

And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the

violent herbage,

lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,

the dark, naif pride.

And deeper even than the bedrock of pride

lies the ponderous fire of naked life

with its strange primordial consciousness of justice

and its primordial consciousness of connection,

connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire

and the old, old final life-truth.

Love is of twoness, and is lovely

like the living life on the earth

but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride,

subterranean,

and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of

the middle

which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable

fire of all things

and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion

and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness

and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial

imperative.

All this is deeper than love

deeper than love.

D.H. Lawrence