Roberta Dewa: Two Poems

Sunday Worship

The first lesson. Start to know your place
as you turn into the minor road heading for
the moors. Although there is no silence
in you, imagine quiet enough to hear
the forest flexing underneath your wheels
the dark lap of the reservoir on flooded hills
the stretch of moorland peat between the tors.

At the locked gate you must leave your car.
This is the second discipline; we teach it here
because you are not to be trusted with an empty road.
You must be taught regression, to walk more
slowly than you need to reach the valley head
leaving no stone ripples in the lake, no heel-ruts in
the path. Feel heavy as the bones of mountains in your feet.

The third task. Walk uphill till you are far from voices,
then stop. Become a shape of stillness: a pine-tree,
a standing stone, a fence-post crumbling in a
scarlet marsh. Be only vaguely human on the skyline
of other people’s sight. Let your life shrink upwards
with the stream; run smaller, clearer, till you vanish
in its source. Wait for the rain. Know what is happening.
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Marilyn: The Misfits, 1960

Welcome to my home.
It is a small grey shack
trembling on wooden legs
assembled quickly on a windy plain.
Inside, I make perpetual coffee
and look out through the spray-grimed glass
into my garden, to the black blown tree
and picket fence they have given me.

From my window I can do most things.
I can make the outside still enough
for you to see my mother walk
the cabbage-rows, planting cut
white flowers in the mounded earth.
Talking with her is not allowed
but she has a gesture-language
I can understand. Sometimes
her fingers grasp the underlip
of Heaven; sometimes they wrap
around a stem, to steady both of us
as the ground shakes.

If you stay longer, you will feel it.
The rumbling in your head will be
the truck, driving the dirt road
with men and liquor, come to take
the house away. At the same time
they will dim the lights; and colors
will return to those who have them
sweeping blue night across the plain.
But my guess is, you will be gone
shuffling your feet toward the bangingdoor
before I fold myself into the homeless ground.
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