Showing posts with label poet marianne moore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poet marianne moore. Show all posts

Monday, December 21, 2009

Messengers Much like Ourselves

"Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it."  --The Poems of Marianne Moore

                      By Disposition of Angels
Messengers much like ourselves? Explain it.
Steadfastness the darkness makes explicit?
Something heard most clearly when not near it?
Above unparticularities,

these unparticularities praise cannot violate.
One has seen, in such steadfastness never deflected,
how by darkness a star is perfected.

Star that does not ask me if I have seen it?
Fir that would not wish to uproot it?
Speech that does not ask me if I hear it?
Mysteries expound mysteries.
Steadier than steady, star dazling me, live and elate,
no need to say, how like some we have known; too like her,
too like him, and a-quiver forever.


American poet Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1897; she moved as a child with her family to Pennsylvania; later she attended Bryn Mawr College. Her earliest poems appeared in Poetry and The Egoist magazines.