Are these the birds that you heard?
Are these the blooms you smelled?
Are these the bands of sunrise
That whispered in the dell?
Are these the skies that taught you?
Are these the stars you sought?
Are these the paths you wandered
In search of ought and naught?
Is this the way you flourished?
Is this the reverie?
Are these the days you numbered?
Is this the mystery?
(3 August 2008, Amherst, Massachusetts)
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2 comments:
hm. when i started reading i wasn't sure i liked it but by stanza two my mind changed, and i really like the end. only thing i'm not sure about is the "ought or nought" - maybe it's just cos while i know what the phrase means i don't know how to use it (never used it) i do think that it seems like the vocabulary ED could have used so that it should fit. so what am i actually saying? :-) i don't know. it's just the one place i hesitated a second when reading.
I deleted my comment above so that I could edit it here. The syntactic pair "ought and naught" is a Simple Formula using an argument and a negative counter-argument to express a notion of totality (see Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon, 1995). In other words, anything + nothing = everything.
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