“When You Return” by Ellen Bass
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
This poem appears in Ellen Bass’s book “Like a Beggar” published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014 For more information on Ellen Bass and her poetry go to her website https://www.ellenbass.com/ Poem posted here under “fair use” guidance.
While warming up beside an enormous stone fireplace with a dozen other writing workshop participants in western North Carolina, I listened to an instructor read the poem “When You Return” by Ellen Bass. I had come to the retreat wrung out from church trauma and the ache of not knowing where I fit in anymore. As the flames crackled and spit, the reader spoke words that singed the edges of longings I hadn’t yet noticed—longings for crooked paths to be made straight, for broken things to be made whole. I was crying by the time he recited the last few lines— “the way it was / before the world was born, / that fresh, that whole, nothing / broken, nothing torn apart.” The tears surprised me; a snowmelt after years of frozen longing that finally began to thaw.
Continue reading “How I Have Been Influenced by Poet Ellen Bass by Charlotte Donlon”
