The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
~Roger McGough

Remarkable Emily.  I just started getting into poetry so I know I am a neophyte and all, but I find some striking similarities to your poem and Todd's "mist" posted about the same time last night. 

Janelle:  Thanks for sharing Julia De Burgos; her poems are so poignant.  I just read her bio.  Her life was filled with much pain which most certainly contributed to her heroic qualities. 

Yes to the girls!

A Meeting Mary Oliver

She steps into the dark swamp where the long wait ends. The secret slippery package drops to the weeds. She leans her long neck and tongues it between breaths slack with exhaustion and after a while it rises and becomes a creature like her, but much smaller. So now there are two. And they walk together like a dream under the trees. In early June, at the edge of a field thick with pink and yellow flowers I meet them. I can only stare. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her child leaps among the flowers, the blue of the sky falls over me like silk, the flowers burn, and I want to live my life all over again, to begin again, to be utterly wild.

Robinson Jeffers was an American poet. He was a 20th century poet who lived through both World War 1 and 2 and you can see the influence of these turbulent times on his work. From what I know of Nihilism I think it is fair to say Jeffers was a Nihilist. I suppose one could view his writing as dark and fatalistic but I tend to see simply stark realism in his words. He writes often about fate and inevitability. While some might find futility or resignation in his work I find the calm of acceptance.

My brother has tried to turn me on to Jeffers for quite some time. I feel his stuff really starting to click with me recently.

Sign-Post

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how. Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity, Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow, Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man. Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes; Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain, For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length You will look back along the star's rays and see that even The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven. Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human, But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman. Robinson Jeffers

The Great Explosion

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart. It is expanding, the farthest nebulae Rush with the speed of light into empty space. It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies, dust clouds and nebulae Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one harbor, they stick in one lump And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no way to express that explosion; all that exists Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each other into all the sky, new universes Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae like charging spearmen again Invade emptiness. No wonder we are so fascinated with fireworks And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for the howling fireblast that we were born from. But the whole sum of the energies That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will gather again and pile up, the power and the glory-- And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the whole universe beats like a heart. Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back and forth, live and die, burn and be damned, The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His terrible life. He is beautiful beyond belief. And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty. We see it above our torment, that's what life's for. He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care and will never cease. Look at the seas there Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty. The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not --of faceless violence, the root of all things. Robinson Jeffers

Star-Swirls

Robinson Jeffers

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean ; Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher. They will drown New York, they will drown London. And this place, where I have planted trees and built a stone house, Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish, And little fish will flicker in and out the windows. I built it well, Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite, The tower at least will hold against the sea's buffeting ; it will become Geological, fossil and permanent. What a pleasure it is to mix one's mind with geological Time, or with astronomical relax it. There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man. His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance : let him count the star-swirls.