1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 10 wednesday june 23 1982" AND stemmed:all)
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This time, though, I have the translation of a whole composition to present. Jane spontaneously gave voice to her song yesterday afternoon while sitting in the glass-enclosed front porch of our hill house. The day was mild and sunny and breezy, and I’d opened all of the windows for her. The rich green lawn sloped down to the great maple and the sumac trees lining the road. I hadn’t asked her to do a song for this last essay; she told me afterward that she hadn’t realized I was that close to finishing it. (The whole series has taken much longer than I expected it to, though.) I only know that Jane began to sing in very melodious tones that flowed through the house. I easily heard her from my writing room. “Oh, your singing is so clear and sweet!” her visiting nurse had exclaimed the other day, when my wife had begun to sing while the nurse was changing the dressings on her decubiti. And that present clarity of voice, almost free of tremor, showed how much Jane has improved since returning home. How different her singing is now from that very mournful Sumari song she’d recorded last February, a few days before going into the hospital. “Let my soul find shelter elsewhere,” she’d lamented then.
Jane didn’t tape this new Sumari, though—which we regretted—for she wasn’t able to get out of her chair to hunt for her recorder; I was too charmed just listening to her sing to think of a tape. She wrote down the translation as soon as she finished the song. When she read it to me I knew at once that it would go here, for a few words she certainly sang of the basic theme of these essays—of the sublime, immortal consciounesses of the earth and All That Is, of that loving redemption that consciousness always makes possible somehow, somewhere, in the eternal private world of each of us, and that each of us always seeks:
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While you were
sleeping,
all the cupboards
of the earth
were filled.
Mother Earth
sought out each
need.
While you were
weeping,
your tears fell
as sweet rain
drops on small
parched hills
that rise in worlds
you cannot see,
though you are known
there.
While you were
sleeping,
Mother Earth
filled all the
cupboards of your
flesh
to overflowing.
Not one atom went
uncomforted
in worlds that
are yours,
but beyond your
knowing.