Sorry to have been absent from the blog this week—I’ve been busy trying to keep up with the comments on Gershom’s South Jerusalem History Awards post, which has set an all-time SoJo record. Pretty interesting debate, too (although I encourage Suzanne, Charlotte, Raghav and the rest to count to ten before hitting the send button—I’m gratified by the high quality of the discussion but could do without the pique).
I just want to flag a new poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite poets (as readers of my posts will know), at The New Yorker. It’s called Dust and it’s worthy pre-Shabbat reading.
I don’t have time to write in detail. But Williams’ image, that the stuff in his mind and heart, the stuff from which he composes his poetry, is dust, seems to me to play off two sources. The first Genesis 2:7 (and elsewhere in the Bible), where dust is the substance from which God fashioned man. We usually take that to mean that God made man (and woman’s) physical body out of dust, but Williams offers another reading.
The second is Shakespeare, namely Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, which I recently quoted here in another context. Man, says Hamlet, is “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
Rosencrantz’s reply, “My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts,” shows us that some people aren’t dusty in side. Only poets and madmen.
Then there’s Kansas — “Dust In The Wind” which haunts me every time I hear it.
And in The Saladin Murders, Matt Rees almost makes dust a character in the story…
Here’s a dust poem for you, by Rupert Brooke. Part of it was used in the lyrics to a Fleetwood Mac song (called Dust) which is the only reason I’ve heard of it.
Dust
When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;
When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has still’d the labour of my breath –
When we are dust, when we are dust!
Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.
And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,
Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that’s I
Shall meet one atom that was you.
Then in some garden hush’d from wind,
Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow
Upon the peace; and, past desiring,
So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,
They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,
Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,
Out of the garden, higher, higher. . . .
But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering ecstasy of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn
And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know – poor fools, they’ll know!
One moment, what it is to love.
— Rupert Brooke