Solstice
The Earth today tilts one way, then another.
And yes, though all things change,
this night again will watch its fireflies,
then go in to a bed with sheets,
to lights, a beloved.
To running water cold and hot.
Take nothing for granted,
you who were also opulent, a stung cosmos.
Birds sang, frogs sang, their sufficient unto.
The late-night rain-bringing thunder.
And if days grew ordinarily shorter,
the dark’s mirror lengthened,
and one’s gain was not the other lessened.
I asked to be lush, to be green.
I pressed myself to the clear glass
between wanting and world.
I wanted to be lush, tropical,
excessive. To be green.
On the glass that does not exist,
small breath-clouds rose, dissolved.
A creature of water, I found myself.
Tender, still also of air.
The dry bark of trees
sequestered its hidden rising.
I told my want: patience.
I offered my want the old promise—
a tree not wet to the touch is wet to the living.
My Failure
I said of the view: “just some trees.”
Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including New & Selected Poems forthcoming from Knopf in 2023; Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004); and The Heart of Haiku (2011).
Read poetry by Jane Hirshfield previously appearing in Terrain.org: Letter to America: “Spell to Be Said Against Hatred,” “Today Another Universe,” and three poems.
Header photo by HTU, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Jane Hirshfield by Curt Richter.
