Cathy
East
Coker V (excerpt) -- T. S. Eliot
Home is where one starts
from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern
more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense
moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime
burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But
of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the
evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under
lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is
most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old
men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We
must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a
further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the
empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of
the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
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