For the Children by Gary Snyder

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Gary Snyder

photo, of Sarah and her sisters, provided by me.

it will probably be a fish,

The Art Of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.
Billy Collins

 

http://alicedraws.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-12-07T12%3A46%3A00Z&max-results=10

time will drop its sail like a clipper in a lagoon

Song of the Current at Cape Horn

Come ride the fish-bright
   swells of my flesh
and lay-by in my limbs,
   greener than a glade.
Run aground, sailor,
   in my dark, tussocked eyes
swing round your mizzen,
   shipwreck in my thighs.

Only, come to my harbor.
   Sweet is the port air.
Time will drop its sail
   like a clipper in a lagoon.

There's a berth in my hips
   as wide as the moon,
a ribcage roomier than the sea,
   and here, awash
between outcry and the deep blue,
   my plunging heart
will fathom life from you.

   Diane Ackerman

http://www.wainscoat.com/south-america/cape-horn5.jpg