Denise Levertov

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.

Denise Levertov: six poems
Denise reads her poetry
The Great Unknowing
Of being
Selected Poems