On The Light In The Night Sky
This piece by James Dickey reminds me of the 1998 animated short, Bunny, which won over 25 international awards, namely, the First Prize title at the International Children's Cinema. Similar to Pixar's Up, Bunny serves as an exploration of life and death, while focusing on events that surround the passing of the title character's companion.
There is a beautiful scene in which moths flying at a light bulb are juxtaposed with the widely held idea that one "heads" into a great light as their soul passes over.
I don't know if it's images of the moths in this poem, or perhaps the it's simply the hints at the quest for meaning and mission that makes me connect these two, but I feel that there is a definite common resonance.
I strongly recommend you check it out at the You Tube Link Here:
The Strength of Fields
... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source
of power and a life-enhancing return ...
Van Gennep: Rites de Passage
Moth-force a small town always
has,
Given the night.
What field-forms can be,
Outlying the small
civic light-decisions over
A man walking
near home?
Men
are not where he is
Exactly now, but they
are around him around him like the strength
Of fields. The solar system
floats on
Above him in town-moths.
Tell
me, train-sound,
With all your long-lost
grief,
what
I can give.
Dear Lord of all the
fields
what
am I going to do?
Street-lights, blue-force and frail
As the homes of men, tell me
how to do it how
To withdraw how to
penetrate and find the source
Of the power you always
had
light
as a moth, and rising
With the level and
moonlit expansion
Of the fields around, and
the sleep of hoping men.
You? I? What
difference is there? We can all be saved
By a secret blooming.
Now as I walk
The night and you walk with
me we know simplicity
Is close to the source that
sleeping men
Search for in their
home-deep beds.
We know that the sun is
away we know that the sun can be conquered
By moths, in blue home-town
air.
The stars splinter,
pointed and wild. The dead lie under
The pastures. They look on
and help. Tell me, freight-train,
When there is no one else
To hear. Tell me in a voice
the sea
Would have, if it had
not a better one: as it lifts,
Hundreds of miles
away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar
Like the
profound, unstoppable craving
Of nations for
their wish.
Hunger,
time and the moon:
The moon lying on the
brain
as on the excited sea as on
The strength of
fields. Lord, let me shake
With purpose. Wild
hope can always spring
From tended
strength. Everything is in that.
That and nothing
but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord
Of the renewing green. That
is where it all has to start:
With the simplest
things. More kindness will do nothing less
Than save every
sleeping one
And night-walking
one
Of us.
My life
belongs to the world. I will do what I can.
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| Bunny |
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