If you see a child that shivers when it hears a diminished fifth, nurture and protect him, for he only in the schoolyard's fierce abstraction will know the cry of the lynx, the cry of the hare, and that of the old man and the young woman. Shivering is his genius. If he have speech, he will utter it greatly. If not, he will search in other ways beyond the ordinarily human, the hating and angered. He will hear the light, he will sing the light and the darkness, or will sound the ideas of them in the concrete nothingness of tones vibrating in the air that sight cannot conceive, yet they touch each one of us. He will hear love where we would behold a wound. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...EPIGRAM: 27. THE FRUIT by THOMAS WYATT AN ESCAPE by LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE MOUNT RAINIER by HERBERT BASHFORD EARTH by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT IN LONDON ON SATURDAY NIGHT by ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN MUSIC by ALICE (HENDERSON) CORBIN THE GIVEN HEART by ABRAHAM COWLEY |