Essential Poem

For John Hollander Although it’s likely you’re on your own at this moment in this city of three million reading the poems of Traherne, and there was no one till you lit your lamp, the kingdom of childhood keeps being founded in his voice and his seeing, which are a sort of birth. A birth goes on in the dark of a poor family, or a mother alone. Then comes the small bright circle of the faces: lover pores over sleeping loved one, parent over child in their enclosure we name home, a hut in the plain so bare there’s not a tongue of grass to make the wind hiss. Unknown to the world a world exists: trees and streams, birds all the colors of the flowers. So Traherne pours over you his wild remembrance of the world to come. And would even in the silence of his book if it were lost and lay unopened two hundred years. Even if he had died before he sang the Eden in his look.