From Stanley Kunitz

From The Poetry Garden, Seattle Center

An intimate gathering tonight at The Poetry Garden, Seattle Center. Glad to find this place of carved stones with lines from Stanley Kunitz, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Naomi Shihab Nye, Marge Piercy and others. This is a city alive with poetry --- even in its carved stones.

Here is "The Layers" --- the poem these lines are taken from. This is one of my all time favorites.

The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz
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 proceed 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 on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.