Poetry—and Fortune

 
Poetry—and Fortune

Poetry, in you I found a solace true—
Depicting, in a foreign tongue, what I 
Perceived of worth, in spite of all we rue  
In this, the world we’re in, not knowing why 
We came—or whence—or where we’re going to.

And then, on finding, buried deep within, 
My own forgotten tongue, whose cadence I
Had gained in childhood, through my closest kin,
And then had seemed to lose—and left to die,
I found the strength to turn—and so begin. 

******

How rarely do we get, alas, this chance
To find again what we had thought we’d lost!
As one by one the words began to dance
Upon my tongue, not asking for the cost 
Of long neglect, I felt the grace of Chance—

That goddess, yes, to whom we rarely pray,
Who yet determines what we are and do,
Whose willful whims we must perforce obey—
Who spins, upon her fingers, me and you—
And only rarely kisses us—in play.

******

And so the prosody of Greece and Rome
Had passed, through western isles, to a distant land—
Where I, like others, spoke a tongue at home
And learned, in school, to speak and understand
Another that we made in part our own—

And then had met the rhythms, side by side, 
Of a lilting tongue of sky and sun and field—
Of cloud and rain and rivers flowing wide—
To clash with these and then to merge and yield—
To birth the waves that motes like me could ride.

2023 January 26th, Thu.
Berkeley, California