Nothing Is Far

- Robert Francis

 

Though I have never caught the word

Of God from any calling bird,

I hear all that the ancients heard.

 

Though I have seen no deity

Enter or leave a twilit tree,

I see all that the seers see.

 

A common stone can still reveal

Something not stone, not seen, yet real.

What may a common stone conceal?

 

Nothing is far that once was near.

Nothing is hid that once was clear.

Nothing was God that is not here.

 

Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.

Here in the sun I sit alone

Between the known and the unknown.

 

 

from: Collected Poems, 1936-1976  Copyright 1976.

Waxwings

- Robert Francis

Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berry bush
in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety--
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk--
was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together--for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.