Poetry in Ordinary Time

This week, something from the late Peggy Freydberg (March 6, 1908 - March 27, 2015)...

Be Still, My Soul*

The rooms overlooking the pond

have enlarged with an ethereal light.

The sky fills them.

It is time to light a fire, 

to pour a glass of wine.

To sit,

and wait,

for all those satisfactions

that always fail to satisfy.

Instead,

restless, I start to wander

through the strange vast glowing of the rooms.

I tell myself

I want to see the hymn of the setting sun

along the old stone wall built centuries ago

to keep a farmer's sheep from wandering far afield.

By a window in the bedroom,

on an antique carved Italian chair,

I find my cat,

sitting with unfathomable stillness,

looking out.

At what?

I see no creature moving.

But, 

how can I see

what cats see?

How can I perceive a variation of existence

known only to a cat,

who watches the light on an old stone wall,

or the ghosts of sheep?

For my soul's sake,

I bend,

and,

carefully,

I place the palms of both my hands

along his sides,

finding a being without boundaries.

Sudden,

complete and sweet as truth,

his stillness

strikes me into stillness.

*From Poems from the Pond: 107 Years of Words and Wisdom - Peggy Freydberg, 2015.