Poetry Archives

This is a poem I wrote before I died and was reborn:
—After the years of the apples ripening and the eagles
    soaring,
After the festival here the small flowers gleamed like the
    first stars,
And the horses cantered and romped away like the
    experience of skill; mastered and serene
Power, grasped and governed by reins, lightly held by
    knowing hands.

The horses had cantered away, far enough away
So that I saw the horses’ heads farther and farther away
And saw that they had reached the black horizon on the
    dusk of day
And were or seemed black thunderheads, massy and
    ominous waves in the doomed sky:
And it was then, for the first time, then that I said as I
    must always say
All through living death of night:
It is always darkness before delight!
The long night is always the beginning of the vivid blossom of day.