Essential Poem

Although it’s likely you’re on your own

at this moment in this city of three million

reading the poems of Traherne,

and there was no one till you lit your lamp,

the kingdom of childhood keeps being founded

in his voice and his seeing,

which are a sort of birth. A birth goes on

in the dark of a poor family, or a mother alone.

Then comes the small bright circle of the faces:

lover pores over sleeping loved one, parent over child

in their enclosure we name home,

a hut in the plain so bare there’s not a tongue

of grass to make the wind hiss. Unknown

to the world a world exists:

trees and streams, birds all the colors of the flowers.

So Traherne pours over you

his wild remembrance of the world to come. And would

even in the silence of his book

if it were lost and lay unopened

two hundred years. Even if he had died

before he sang the Eden in his look.