The Inner Valley

Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    Slouches towards

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ******* ✍ Robert Lee Frost (San Francisco, California, 26 March 1874 ~ Boston, Massachusetts, 29 January 1963). ◙ Ivan Shishkin 

In the spring of your eyes live the nets of the fishermen of the mad sea. In the spring of your eyes the sea keeps its promises. Here I, a heart that has dwelt among humans, cast off my clothes and the lustre of an oath: blacker in black, I am more naked. Only now disloyal am I faithful. I am you when I am I in the spring of your eyes I drift and dream of plunder. A net catches a net we part embracing. In the spring of your eyes a hanged man strangles the rope.  ******* ✍  Paul Celan (Czernovitz, Romania, November 23, 1920 ~ Paris, France, April 20, 1970). ◙ Artwork: John William Waterhouse

We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge. And though you probe and pry With analytic eye, And eavesdrop all our talk With an amused look, You cannot find the centre Where we dance, where we play, Where life is still asleep Under the closed flower, Under the smooth shell Of eggs in the cupped nest That mock the faded blue Of your remoter heaven. ✍ Ronald Stuart Thomas (Cardiff, Wales, 29 March 1913 ~ Pentrefelin, Wales, 25 September 2000). ◙ Albert Edelfelt