"The Layers" - Poet, Stanely Kunitz

"The Layers"

The following are words by Stanely Kunitz, NY - {a favourite author/poet}
(please excuse spelling errors - author is visually challenged)

"I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray.  When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceeded on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.

 Oh,  I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered!  How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. 

Yet, I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me.  In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:  "Live in the layers, not in the litter."  Though I lack the art to decipher it, to no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written.  I am not done with my changes".

.....  In Memory of Stanley Kuntz (Poet Laureate, USA - 1995)

- Nightingale (author of blog Everlasting)