The Season of Phantasmal Peace

Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill --
the net rising soundless at night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
                                           it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

-- Derek Walcott. The Fortunate Traveller. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981.

They only rise a few feet into the air, but they all do so at the same time,
these garbage men of America's deuce-dim cities and towns,
and their farts are of many colors and long-lasting,
propelling them them languidly through the street-glare and horns
the morning is huddling away from. The long-invisible
poetry of commerce's bug-proud idea-less edifices glitters briefly
each time one of the garbagemen shivers in and through it, but
the few people entering the dawn ignore them as they spindle
into the abandoned garbage trucks, singing autumnal songs
in the language of cocker spaniels, poodles, beagles
and spiders that cathedral into the limpid politics
that the farts of the still-stony-faced garbage men have now become.
Slowly, all the nations of the world edify into the deepest heart of a peace
that will last the entire three millenia it will take for the garbagemen
to reach the blueberry south of the next morning.

The oaks' and the maples' attention ripens into that peace, solidifying it,
and the chrysanthemums, humming back to the previous April, liquify it.
Housewives, free at last, billow out of their kitchen-windows
with spray-bottles aglow with found children's knowledge of rainbows
eradicating all possibility of bacterial contamination
                                                                            while all the world's guns
marry each other, as do the world's knives, each same with same,
for division has been exiled to the armpits of the now-smiling garbagemen.
The oaks' and the maples' attention draws highways out of the marriages
that no one sees or hears but which nonetheless somehow play banjos. It is
holy in a way nothing ever before has been holy, the harmony awakening
through the cities and towns and into the countryside.
The oceans inhale it, and convert it to revivals of Fiddler on the Roof,
with all the parts played by milkmen from the thirties, and cheese of many flavors.
The rivers worship it into revivals of Hair, housecats taking all the roles,
and the lakes and ponds, sagacious with dragonflies,
slowly make it into laws flavoring the rights of dandelions.

Bob Grumman. 28 May 2009 (in about ten minutes)