That Strain Again
A poem. "So I and my country go"
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For years, I’ve heard their music from my desk
Like Yeats’ clamoring swans at Coole.
The echo of an unseen restlessness:
Goose-call over the fields.
Mostly a nuisance and stubbornly wild,
Each mourns like a crying child.
There’s something a bit precious in that beauty:
An easy target for a poet’s ear
Who sifts out symbols for his country’s suffering
As if it were his own.
Masked in black like thieves, the wild geese flee
Over an unpoetic country
That bucks against description and good sense,
That has no use for careful words.
With the geese it shares an innocence
That’s less than virtuous
So that, unlike Yeats, I take offense
Not at mortality but ignorance.
Fog hunches in the fields, I at my desk,
Unattended by passion or conquest.
”Compose in darkness,” another poet said.
So I and my country go
Like ink spilled in the darkness,
Blind to what we make ourselves.
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