Morning Trip (47)

“THE SAPPHIRE
After a dream in which your love’s fullness
Was heaven and earth, I stood on nothing in darkness,
Neither finding nor falling, without hope nor dread,
Not knowing pleasure nor discontented.
In time, like the first beam arriving from
The first star, a ray from a seed of light came,
Whose source, coming nearer, (I could not say whether
It rose or descended, for there was no higher nor lower)
To a trumpet’s thin sweet highest note
Which grew to the pitch of pain, showed how its white
Light proceeded all from a blue crystal stone
Large as a child’s skull, shaped so, lucent as when
Daylight strikes sideways through a cat’s eyes;
Blue not blinding, its light did not shine but was;
And came, as the trumpet pierced through into silence,
To hover so close before my hands
That I might have held it, but that one does not handle
What one accepts as a miracle.
A great sapphire it was whose light and cradle
Held all things;there were the delights of skies, though
Its cloudless blue was different; of sea and meadow,
But their shapes not seen, The stone unheld was mine,
But yours the sense by which, without further sign
I recognized its visionary presence
By its clarity, its changless patience,
And the unuttered joy that it was,
As the world’s love before the world was.”
–W.S. Merwin