Hilda Morley: "Sea-Map"

                                           

Taste of salt on my fingers,

                                                   that’s how

I like it:

                the line of sea rising

above the dark-green pine,

                                                  the sea meeting

the horizon,

                        so always the eyes are lifted higher,

                        the pulse buoyed upward

with them

                    So it

should be for us all—

                                         to belong to

whatever moves us outward into

the wideness, for journeying,

                                                      tales of

distant places,

                              treasures piled

                              to fill our smiling,

                                                                for us to know of

along the travelled coastline,

                                                      the mountains

we can climb to,

                                each port,

                                                      each harbor

another window to wash our faces in,

                                                                                pull us

forward

                  & made for us,     made for

all of us,

                    as the birds know, who

fly the continents,     the oceans

for their secret reasons,

                                             a map of the earth

written inside their bodies,

                                                   marked

under their breastbones:   

                                               a continuance

of the now most fragile,         

                                                 always travelled

patiently enduring world

"Sea-Map" by Hilda Morley, from Cloudless at First. © Moyer Bell, 1995.

Art credit: "Where the sea and sky meet," photograph by Saira (originally color).

Hilda Morley: "New York Subway"

The beauty of people in the subway
that evening, Saturday, holding the door for whoever
was slower or
left behind
                   (even with
                   all that Saturday-night
                   excitement)
& the high-school boys from Queens, boasting,
joking together
proudly in their expectations
& power,       young frolicsome
bulls,
          & the three office-girls
each strangely beautiful,             the Indian
with dark skin & the girl with her haircut
very short and fringed, like Joan
at the stake,             the corners
of her mouth laughing
                                 & the black girl delicate
as a doe, dark-brown in pale-brown clothes
& the tall woman in a long caftan, the other day,
serene & serious        & the Puerto Rican
holding the door for more than 3 minutes for
the feeble, crippled, hunched little man who
could not raise his head,
                                      whose hand I held, to
help him into the subway-car—
                                                    so we were
joined in helping him               & someone,
seeing us, gives up his seat,
                                             learning
from us what we had learned from each other.

 "New York Subway" by Hilda Morley, from To Hold My Hand: Selected Poems 1955-1983. © The Sheep Meadow Press, 1983.

Photography credit: "Old Man on Subway," acrylic on canvas, by Leonardo Ruggieri.