'Out of which miracles leap'

 

“Apoet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck bylightning.” –    JamesDickey

             

Born in Atlanta in 1923,Dickey was a U.S. Poet Laureate and multiple award winner for a wide range of hisworks.  Despite his success as a poet, he might be best known for histaut novel Deliverance, also a successful movie. Dickey’s first book of poems – Into the Stone and Other Poems – waspublished in 1960.  His second, Buckdancer'sChoice, earned him a National Book Award for Poetry.  

            All 331 ofhis poems can be found in The Complete Poems of James Dickey.   ForSaturday’s Poem, here is Dickey’s,

                                         AtDarien Bridge

                                  The sea here used to look
                                  As if many convicts had built it,

                                 Standing deep in their ankle chains,
                                  Ankle-deep in the water, to smite

                                  The land and break it down to salt.
                                  I was in this bog as a child

                                  When they were all working all day
                                  To drive the pilings down.

                                  I thought I saw the still sun
                                  Strike the side of a hammer in flight

                                  And from it a sea bird be born
                                  To take off over the marshes.

                                  As the gray climbs the side of my head
                                  And cuts my brain off from the world,

                                  I walk and wish mainly for birds,
                                  For the one bird no one has looked for

                                  To spring again from a flash
                                  Of metal, perhaps from the scratched

                                  Wedding band on my ring finger.
                                  Recalling the chains of their feet,

                                   I stand and look out over grasses
                                  At the bridge they built, long abandoned,

                                  Breaking down into water at last,
                                  And long, like them, for freedom

                                  Or death, or to believe again
                                  That they worked on the ocean to give it

                                  The unchanging, hopeless look
                                  Out of which all miracles leap.