Care II

I've sent you a poem; your first glimpse

of how, in that other world, I speak.

It is a life-line thrown to you, since

things have changed between us.  Though I feel weak

wondering how you will be struck by this,

I'm strong with the sense of this new thing, this freak

version of me; because the poem, "Care", is

one that came in a kind of trance—

which means I don't know where it came from, or how

it moved itself from thought to thought, sequenced

without help of logic.  All I did was allow

it.  Yet it says what I know I want

to say to you: love's a specter which haunts

the living back to life.  You see, the peak

of it is not in the couplet ending,

the rhyme, the period; but in the sending.

Kate Light

From The Laws of Falling Bodies, Story Line Press,
© 1997, co-winner of the 1997 Nicholas Roerich Prize.
Reprinted by permission of the author.