My footsteps in scree are a turtle shell rattle, The wind in the pines is the bone whistle's call Piping along the black edge where basalt meets blue sky
My song of praise tunes itself to the wind organ My bended knee genuflects toward a white lupine I place my foot firmly on the well-worn trail That snowline is at least twenty feet above my headĪnd remember that the soaring arches of cathedrals Taking moment of silence, i contemplate the reckoning Gazing skyward, i scan for small metal trail markers
#Pablo neruda toward the splendid city summary how to#
As real as the cycles of seed and fallow, rain and drought, our actions will return and meet us, if we know how to pay attention. What does it mean to live on the earth? What does it mean to feel the abiding pulse and rhythm of a time and a place? One of the reasons for staying in contact with the living earth around us, of which we are ourselves a living part, is so that we understand that our actions have consequences. Having no one to lean on, the fresh flowers sign The flower vendor has left the street corner Is a stone made for throwing, not for skipping a small boy is picking up a stone, but it This is one of the things I found Mish doing again and again in her poems. To remake and renew the ways we talk with each other, and the things we say. One of the essential tasks of a poet, particularly in the times in which we live right now, is to break through the deadened nerveless language and thought and perception constantly scattered over the daily landscape by the machines of corporate and military bureaucracy. These are poems of raw spare power and tenderness, deeply rooted in the earth and in all of us who live and work on the earth. Toward the Splendid City is, in addition to being a portrait of New York, a tribute to its Philharmonic Orchestra.For some time now I've wanted to talk about Work Is Love Made Visible, a book of poems by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish ( West End Press, 2009). The work’s title comes from the heading of Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize address in 1974, in which he included the following: “We must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human.” It was, needless to say, a relationship badly in need of resolution.Įventually, upon returning to Manhattan, I began to understand that the humanity and the difficulty of New York were inseparable - and that if in the difficulties of urban life humanity is to be embraced, then the inconveniences must also be accepted. I was, however, not without a certain pang of nostalgia for my home town, and as a result Toward the Splendid City was driven by my love-hate relationship with New York.
Life was always complicated in the city and easier, it seemed, everywhere else. At the time I was nearing the end of a year-long residency with the Seattle Symphony, and had serious second thoughts about returning to New York. Work on the piece began in Seattle in the spring of 1992 and was completed in mid-August of that year in Taos, New Mexico. While Toward the Splendid City was composed as a portrait of New York, the city in which I live, it was written almost entirely away from home.
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