Poem Therapy at 1:16 P.M. - Hester Knibbe

Never Alone Shirae from shirae.etsy.com


Light-years
Hester Knibbe
Translated by Jacquelyn Pope

It’s a beautiful world, you said,
with these trees, marshes, deserts,
grasses, rivers and seas

and so on. And the moon is really something
in its circuits
of relative radiance. Include

the wingèd M, voluptuous
Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil
J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus

U and N and the wanderer P, in short
the whole solar family, complete with its
Milky Way, and count up all the other

systems with dots and spots and in
that endless emptiness what you’ve got
is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful

universe, you said, just take a good look
through the desert’s dark glasses
for instance or on your back

in seas of grass, take a good look
at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there
somewhere, together.


It is a beautiful world, a beautiful universe. Lucky us that "the world offers itself to our imagination" as poet Mary Oliver said in her poem Wild Geese. Also, that regardless of how alone we may feel, the stars are always present.

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