The wondeful thing about poetry is how it can assure us that others have experienced our pain and have survived to write about it, helps to put raw feelings into words and phrases and provide meaning in a world that may feel devoid of meaning.


"Revisitation" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

...Still I must make a faithful pilgrimage
To those particular landmarks that were yours,
Or intimately haunted by your sight;
Not in the hope of finding you again,
Not in obeisance to your memory,
Nor self indulgently in search of pain.
No, I must go
Back to the places
Where you put your hand,
To see them now without you, gutted bare,
Swept hollow of your presence. I must stand
Alone and in their empty faces stare,
To find another truth I do not know;
To balance those unequal shifted planes
Of our existence, yours and mine; to fix
The whirling landscapes of the heart in which
I walk a stranger both to space and time
I must go back;
In each familiar corner wait until
I witness once again the flesh turn cold,
The spirit parting from the body's hold
And let it go, and love the landscape still;
But now on only for itself alone...

For I must meet and marry in myself
The truth of what has ended, what is new;
The past and future; death and life. And when
At last the two conflicting pairs are met;
The planes are balanced and the landscapes set;
The strands of past and future tied in one
Tough, weather-beaten, salted twist of hemp,
The present - then
I shall be able to refind myself
And also you