Listening to Monteverdi
By: Robert Bly
I come from a long line of Protestant revolutionaries Who refused the old marriages with Rome, But I’m still hoping to sit at Moses’ side. Every night the old angels call to us, Promising good things. For centuries the oysters Have been opening and closing at Moses’ side. For centuries I have been no one at all, tossed Up and down, a wild bird in the storm, and yet all That time I have been sitting at Moses’ side. How can it be that we are sons and daughters Of Danish tribesmen, barely Christian at all, Yet all this time we have been sitting at Moses’ side. We know how easily we can veer off the road, And get stuck in the snow, though all that time We still imagine we are sitting at Moses’ side. Let’s forget the idea that we are the old ones, chosen To carry the creation. We are all latecomers To the earth, still hoping to sit at Moses’ side.
You can find this poem in Robert Bly’s— Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems, 1950–2011
Growing up, I remember hearing that there was only one way to worship, just one way to pray, that the true teaching was such-and-such, and that the correct way to live was through so-and-so. Reading the opening stanza
I come from a long line of Protestant revolutionaries
Who refused the old marriages with Rome,
But I’m still hoping to sit at Moses’ side.
reminds me now of the courage it takes to follow our convictions and that, in doing so, we might still arrive where we desired and were once told we could not.
"We are all late comers to the earth." Oh yes! Mere babes wrapped in swaddling clothes. Les enfants terrible. An infinitesimal blink in geologic time. Linear time.
Yet, in the Quantum Physics worldview of "notime," we are eternal energy morphing always into vibrantly new visions.
Kind of screws up the poem.