Amateurs of Heaven

Two lovers to a midnight meadow came

High in the hills, to lie there hand and hand

Like effigies and look up at the stars,

The never-setting ones set in the North

To circle the Pole in idiot majesty,

And wonder what was given them to wonder.

Being amateurs, they knew some of the names

By rote, and could attach the names to stars

And draw the lines invisible between

That humbled all the heavenly things to farm

And forest things and even kitchen things,

A bear, a wagon, a long handled ladle;

Could wonder at the shadow of the world

That brought those lights to light, could wonder too

At the ancestral eyes and the dark mind

Behind them that had reached the length of light

To name the stars and draw the animals

And other stuff that dangled in the height,

Or was it the deep? Did they look in

Or out, the lovers? till they grew bored

As even lovers will, and got up to go,

But drunken now, with staggering and dizziness,

Because the spell of earth had moved them so,

Hallucinating that the heavens moved.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York. He died of cancer at his home in University City, Missouri on July 5th 1991.