Brother Dmitri

And who will deliver us from ourselves
and who will make our strivings upright?

Who will make us die the little deaths-
right shame, right fear, right folly, right hurt?

Who will kiss the lepers,
who will bury all the children?

Who will be the stinging salt
that hurts and heals the wounds?

Who will stand and speak for me
when I have not feet, nor words?

Who will be the fullness
when I am empty-handed?

Who will sow and reap and sow anew,
who will speak and cease to speak?

Who will burn the city down
and build a world from ash?

Neuwelt

Do you ever consider the roads
you drive on? I have been in places
without trees and without hills, where
the earth is like a sea, where there
is only the ripple of tall grass and
the slow rolling of distant clouds, where
the sky looks broader, more immense.

But here, at home, there is nothing like
that, no plains, no unbroken fields.
The roads here bend through thick, close
woods, all leafy trees and soil
underfoot. In the evenings, when the
sun shines down on the drifting, spinning
motes of dust, it seems as though the
trees are themselves a city, these dim
and ancient woods a nation. And sometimes,
where the branches stretch and touch
over the pavement, I feel as though these
streets and roads are the arteries of
some unseen heart, vast and thumping
and, I think, inexorable.

This was the first America, four hundred
years ago. They came to build Jerusalem,
on the shore of the haunted waste. Hollanders
and Englishmen- perhaps some blend of both-
their aims were better than they, and I
love them for that. This was the first
America, and perhaps will be the last.