* ° golden focus beckoning me *. ' * ◭

The Secret

 

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry.

 

I who don’t know the

secret wrote

the line. They

told me

 

(through a third person)

they had found it

but not what it was

not even

 

what line it was. No doubt

by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten

the secret,

 

the line, the name of

the poem. I love them

for finding what

I can’t find,

 

and for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

 

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again, in other

lines

 

in other

happenings. And for

wanting to know it,

for

 

assuming there is such a secret, yes,

for that

most of all.

 

— Denise Levertov

 

"A poem about reading, about remembering what has been read, about entering into a conversation with it, via others, in an effort to somehow make it permanent, this winged and sacred moment."

 

.

it’s the way

radiant epiphanies recur, recur

 

— Denise Levertov

 

I love what Levertov says about the radiant epiphanies recurring. Instead of trying to make something wholly unique, why not listen to the voice that calls us back, to the things we circle, to those themes that recur and emerge without us necessarily even noticing at first?

 

To notice what we're drawn to or what we instinctively return to can tell us something about those things we need to make. To pay attention to what calls to us again and again is a lovely part of practice.

 

— Shawna Lemay

 

“All which, because it was

flame and song and granted us

joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,

turns out to have been what it was

that once, only;”

 

Denise Levertov, from “Once Only”

 

I never ever have to try to remember you, my dearest friend... you're in my heart always; your love beyond boundaries of space and time.

Done