i WILL NOT FORGET

In a dark time, the eye begins to see

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree
I live between the heron and the wren
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall
That place among the rocks--is it a cave
Or winding path? The edge is what I have

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear
The mind enters itself, and God the mind

And one is One, free in the tearing wind

(In A Dark Time,Theodore Roethke)