Flo’s Reviews > Astonishments: Selected Poems > Status Update

Conscience is a whole tribunal that you carry in yourself. It’s not only a judge, but a court with a jury and the full apparatus of defense and prosecution.

To treat every day as a word spoken to us. And yourself—as an answer to the word.
(1971)

In this time of anxiety and searching, one should write something, shape something. Whatever it might be, it could lead to proposing some kind of sense and order. Any situation can become a starting point. Knowledge of life doesn’t have a specific beginning and an end. It is like the earth: any point on it can become the beginning or the middle.

Hurry up
perhaps you’ll yet manage to say
what sleeps within grand silence

The lamp
I write in order to comprehend not to express myself...
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence

Dictionaries
How many poems sleep in dictionaries
buried like needles in hay
How many poets not yet born
rolled in tight webs of anger
How many tender confessions there
How many insults
How many falsehoods

And what unexplored
uninhabited
deserts of silences

...
If I were a poet
I’d compose hymns of thanks
to extol my country,
so pleasant from a distance.

from Exile (1970)