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Conrad Potter Aiken - When You Are Not SurprisedConrad Potter Aiken - When You Are Not Surprised
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When you are not surprised, not surprised, nor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow or from shadow into sunlight suiting the color of fright or delight to the bewildering circumstance when you are no longer surprised by the quiet or fury of daybreak the stormy uprush of the sun’s rage over the edges of torn trees torrents of living and dying flung upward and outward inward and downward to space or else peace peace peace peace the wood-thrush speaking his holy holy far hidden in the forest of the mind while slowly the limbs of light unwind and the world’s surface dreams again of night as the center dreams of light when you are not surprised by breath and breath and breath the first unconscious morning breath the tap of the bird’s beak on the pane and do not cry out come again blest blest that you are come again o light o sound o voice of bird o light and memory too o memory blest and curst with the debts of yesterday that would not stay, or stay when you are not surprised by death and death and death death of the bee in the daffodil death of color in the child’s cheek on the young mother’s breast death of sense of touch of sight death of delight and the inward death the inward turning night when the heart hardens itself with hate and indifference for hated self and beloved not-self when you are not surprised by wheel’s turn or turn of season the winged and orbed chariot tilt of time the halcyon pause, the blue caesura of spring and solar rhyme woven into the divinely remembered nest by the dark-eyed love in the oriole’s breast and the tides of space that ring the heart while still, while still, the wave of the invisible world breaks into consciousness in the mind of god then welcome death and be by death benignly welcomed and join again in the ceaseless know-nothing from which you awoke to the first surprise.
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