Poetry Corner: Celebrating the Earth

Inside Rano Raraku with the Guardian (Photo – William O’Daly).

POETRY CORNER

– 4/13/16

We welcome the marvelous poet and masterful translator of eight of Pablo Neruda’s final books, William O’Daly, to Poetry Corner. In 2008, he traveled in the Chilean Nobel laureate’s footsteps, from Santiago to the southern Andes, and then to mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island), tracing in his own words some of Neruda’s most loved and special places. Neruda was inspired by Rapa Nui, more than 2000 miles off the coast of Chile. Amid the thousand carved figures standing or fallen across the island, O’Daly took these photos during his “pilgrimage.” Viewing them, we imagine what O’Daly writes: those “tangled shadows promise a world without grief.”

William O’Daly

Map

Inside Rano Raraku -The Guardian Before Dawn (Photo – William O’Daly).

Strands of web linger
in the branches, a bee stirs,
and the tangled shadows
promise a world without grief.

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Bird

Inside Rano Raraku with View of Tongariki (Photo – William O’Daly).

Every word, thicket, and stone
in this fractured stand of aspen-
living chord, sonata, a single cry
settles the misty mountain peaks.

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The Quiet Hills

Inside Rano Kau at Orongo View toward Antartica (Photo – William O’Daly).

The yellow moon rises
above the sugar pine
in the endless sky –
ten thousand crickets.

Of Earth Day, William O’Daly says, “We are reminded that the arts and the sciences discover their commonality in how they nourish, protect, sustain, and reveal our humanity, in how they are instruments of our discovery of human nature and its role in the web of life and the cosmos — even as the winds and the waters write and erase our names over the earth.”

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♣ We welcome and encourage your response especially in the form of short poems. You may reply by leaving a comment below. The Poetry Corner is hosted by Kathabela Wilson.