The Boreal Wilderness of a Content Heart

We must be further North than we thought.

Where, by the maps haunted with sea serpents,

living, exulting, dancing, tremulous mysteries

hold back laughter beneath every leaf.

 

Like a child playing hide and seek,

biting her tongue not to squeal with delight.

 

The cold grips every nerve in every limb with every movement.

The cold reminds us how gloriously alive we are.

The steam of our breath, twisting in an aerial ballet

leaping deeper, and deeper into this forest,

both new and joyously familiar.

Like a lullaby in old age.

 

The blues and grays of the mist, interrupted.

Swords of sunshine lunging from sky to untrodden earth.

Every leaf, swallow’s song and molecule of mist

 

is alive with silent, jovial anticipation.

Like the last breath before a dive into frigid waters.

The First Years

These are simply lines from the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy” that struck me as particularly beautiful, powerful and strongly poetic. I’ve arranged them in lines and have added and subtracted some punctuation to emphasize the language the way I read it.

 

Once, in those very early days

my brother brought into the nursery

the lid of a biscuit tin, which he had

covered with moss,

garnished with twigs

and flowers so as to make it

a toy garden or toy forest.

 

That was the first beauty I ever knew.

What the real garden had failed to do,

 

the toy garden did.

It made me aware of nature –

not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors,

but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.

 

As long as I live,

my imagination

of Paradise will

retain something

of my brother’s

 

garden.