Hecht, "Motes"

                                        A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.

They wandered out of gloom
Into some golden shaft
Of late-afternoon light,
Those tiny filaments
That filled me with delight,
Lifted by an updraft
Or viewless influence
There in the living room.

They might be minuscule
Angels, it seemed to me,
Needing no wings to rise
Or slide back out of sigt
But floating effortlessly
Through our interior skies,
Each incandescent mite
A pilot at flight school.

Their rises, their declines,
Resembled Jacob’s dream
And seemed an allegory
Enacted just for me
There in my own sunbeam
But swathed in mystery—
Some esoteric story
Wrought in encoded signs:

One more of the shrewd, well-tried
Ways that a child is kept
From some shrouded, grownup truth,
Probably linked with tears;
For the one thing clear to youth
Is that no joy goes unwept,
And that their utmost fears
Will be amply justified;

Which makes them minor sages,
Without the words for what
They cannot yet know or say;
That whatever lies in store,
They were typecast in some play
With a far from comic plot—
Grief, selfishness, and war
Crowding its dog-eared pages.


Anthony Hecht

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