The Pool

Are you alive?
    Empty night,
blind dry leaves
    that gather dust in the silence. The pools has it,
the shadows retained, bright in them,
flashes things of gold. Let us return to young seasons,
where our day wakes, it finds the dew—
vulnerable each hour.

Let water, muddy or clear, ripple, each that can gather to the flatness of a leaf, in the gentle breath of deeper too, the call that is one, and is found out.

As all nature waits, sweetened and alive, let the stones be loosed, till they shine, till they glow with newness!

Let the light return, and awaken our lovely forms to flow as back to the light, for when faint sounds offer the bird’s fall, let the direct light come!

As we turn, come deeply to the agate day. Leaves, and voices who cry we are here! where warm flowers flow, return flowers, to the sungaze.

Thus shall we belong, to be chosen—
a joy that wanders, the leaf the rose, bequeathed to the dusk.

There is a sense we give to dawn, with each shadow we breathe! In the sound of veins broken,
we plant our trees to drink with the sound—
that we are one, with the sun!

How pure the waters flow, beneath our glowing faces. The pool, is ours!
Our lives belong!

• HD Hilda Doolittle