Openings: A Glosa in Honor of Wendell Berry

This is a glosa, a poetry form that Sam Peralta has challenged us to write for dVerse Form For All night. He explains it well–essentially, it’s 4 stanzas, 10 lines each, the 6th, 9th, and 10th lines rhyming. And, most important, each last stanza line is taken from a cabeza, a 4-line heading that is borrowed from a favorite poet one wishes to honor. I’m pretty late getting this out, since I wasn’t sure I would have time today to read and comment. It could have turned out better (I was rushing! something I am opposed to in this poem!!), but it is something I can work with later on. 

Openings

I walk in openings

That when I’m dead will close.

Where the field sparrow sings

Will come the sweet wild rose.

            (Wendell Berry, Sabbath Poems, 1990, IV)

When I was younger

I liked to force my way

Through the woods. The most

Tangled path made me

Feel brave, lording my

Superior wits against Nature, cutting

My way through wildness.

Imagine my surprise, now

That I’m finding

I walk in openings,

Slowly, taking only those steps

Freely offered by the way.

It’s a different kind

Of bravery—non-combative,

Even doubtful. In openings

I am exposed,

Seeing and being seen

By things that live on

The shadow-boundary that’s imposed,

That when I’m dead will close.

And there is a

Hushed joy even in that

Which makes life

A hymn to limitation,

A song of surrender, like

The murmur of wave-rings

Circling out from a thrown stone.

The light rain has begun

To fall in the opening

Where the field sparrow sings

Her single trilled note

To the graying sky.

I am still. A single

Step would feel

Like blasphemy, like breaking

Faith with those

Whose lives are entwined

With mine, soon not to be.

Yet, after we all die and decompose

Will come the sweet wild rose.