Once in an apple orchard at mid-day
I had a moment of second sight as I watched a child at play.
She shone with light like a holy child. She was pure.
She was growing. She was nothing, nothing but love.
She was all that we might be, we and the nations.
She was all that we shall be.
Come, let us face it!
IX
DOES SOMETHING WAIT?
Go and wait somewhere. Take no book, no paper, no
solitaire or needle task.
Nay but forbid yourself also that you reckon the profit or plan a feast
Or discern dust on the lamp;
That you consider to whom to sell or what to wear.
Go and wait somewhere, with forgotten muscles.
Now does something wait with you, glad and welcoming
that you are free to turn to it?
Then you have bread that you know not of and it is brought to you.
Or do you merely sit with an hundred fibres in you pressing to be gone?
Then you are in danger of starvation.
By this means we may almost know what we are.
X
DOORS
At the edge of consciousness is a little door.
What goes by?
Now a wing of brightness, of colour, of something out
there that I love more than I am accustomed to loving.
Now fares by a delicate shadow, patterned, fleet, that
I long to know more than I am accustomed to knowing.
There must be so much more to love and to know than the
little loves and the little knowledge.
Then someone knocks at my door.
Thou!
The wing of brightness, the delicate shadow were but the sign.
What am I to do?
I will find my way to the edge of my consciousness,
I will gain the door, I will have my freedom,
I will love and know and be all being.
Thou art the liberator. Why it is true....
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”
XI
LEVITATION
Three times that day came the sense of levitation.
As if court-house walk, walnut shadow, a length of sunny
lawn let her go by with no tribute of her touch.
It seemed as if the wonderful would happen.
She waited, prepared for the vision.
The day flowered, ripened, mellowed, fell upon night.
No presence opened or signaled.
Then she went to embosom that which the hours had left her.
She faced her day, and her day gathered itself as a living
thing with a voice and deep eyes.
It said, I was wonderful.
Yet the only thing to happen that day had been this:
Old Edgerton Bascom came to the porch, selling buttons.
She bought from him, picked her dahlias for his wife.
He went away, comforted, restored to self-respect by her purchase.
Perhaps when levitation comes it will be a matter of this kind
Rather than of calculation and reckoning.
XII
ENCHANTMENT
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