Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

‘Who Goes There’? —Shakespeare
In memory of Carmen (June 1957—4 July 2010), and of Lawrence, who lingered long
I want to live where the dead can live.
But rooms have gone to garages and garrulous gyms and on the streets of modern towns the trees are tamed.
I hear angels silent amid stones, while in the sand lost children and soldiers moan—or voices catch in a choke of old
leaves worn by the winter wind.
The dead lie, as though they were only bones, mute burdens beneath the stones.
Yet before the doubt and dread and fear of this alien age, a watery curtain once opened, in the gloaming on
the shore between night and day, between liquid air and bones, and the owl flew often in, calling our names from
barnloft or limb.
Still the milky nipples of the moon rise, erect, enrapt in the salty thighs of the tide.
This the peak of a hunger, felt in the transient jewel of the flesh, this the bier for the body and the breaking Earth.
But then
what
balm for the soul in kama loca where the dead go?
What sun for the beasts and the patient trees?
The moon, leading us, as sometime it must, cries out, unbosomed in the sea’s cry.
A gull swoons in, descends to where creatures seem to cease--and all we see is seeming.
The sea turns an unexpected dark, unfathomed by the mind.
Is it wound or womb?--
And again, will a star rise at dawn in the dew’s gleam on the speech of roses in Shreveport, in Sarajevo, on a
hovel in Honduras, and in Shiraz?
From where will the dew come when seas of the world turn dark?
From where the tears we shed? And the meanings of thirst?
Or will, at sunset somewhere, a cactus, all credulous, burst into bloom before the desert’s convening of stars?
Will our inner ear hear, in this midnight, the speech of each’s angel?
And when, beside the desert bloom, the plover—clothed in black wing and white—unwhisperingly, whistlingly appears,
as its spirit must, to carry a desert quest all night—oh, then may the dead, bearing death—like a seed—bearing
life
—oh, then at last may the dead in the laughter of twilight, in contented cries of the rain
drop in on us?
66 • being human
Elaine Upton