Mayflies

Christian Century, July 27, 2004 by Richard Wilbur

Mayflies

   In somber forest, when the sun was low,
   I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies
      In their quadrillions rise
   And animate a ragged patch of glow
   With sudden glittering--as when a crowd
      Of stars appear
   Through a brief gap in black and driven cloud,
   One are of their great round-dance showing clear.

   It was no muddled swarm I witnessed, for
   In entrechats each fluttering insect there
      Rose two steep yards in air,
   Then slowly floated down to climb once more,
   So that they all composed a manifold
      And figured scene,
   And seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold,
   Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.

   Watching those lifelong dancers of a clay
   As night closed in, I felt myself alone
      In a life too much my own,
   More mortal in my separateness than they--
   Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
      Not fly or star
   But one whose task is joyfully to see
   How fair the fiats of the caller are.

"Mayflies" from Mayflies: New Poems and Translations, [c] 2000 by Richard Wilbur, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

THE CALLING OF the poet, as also of the prophet/preacher, is to see; to glimpse behind the mundane veil of ordinary phenomena the extraordinary truth that is reality revealed. Here, in a forest mist of mayflies, Richard Wilbur--twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize--moves from the micro to the macro, from the momentary to the eternal, as he sees, both beyond and yet within the sunset swarming of these tiny insects, the great swirling round dance of the galaxies. And it is all a dance, from the quadrilles and entrechats of these daylong dying midges to the stately, millennial measures of the circling cosmos, a dance in which the role of the poet (and the preacher too) is to witness and rejoice in the majesty of the one who calls the steps and sets the tune.

--J. Barrie Shepherd, a poet and a Presbyterian pastor in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. His Lyman Beecher Lectures will published by Westminster John Knox.