I am in MIchigan this week, delivering the painted quilt to my dad in Grand Rapids, and revisiting favorite locations of my childhood. One place I went today was the bookstore that I frequented in high school, Reader's World in Holland. Here I discovered a new book by a favorite contemplative writer, John O'Donohue. He died in 2008, so this is technically not a new book, but it is a rerelease of his first book of poetry. It is called Echoes of Memory. Here is the first poem from the book:
NOWHERE
They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of danger to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untouched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dream of the unknown.
No. They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost,
where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard
without anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring
is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere.
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