FOR YEARS I’VE RETURNED, at some time in the course of cold and windy Advent evenings, to the same poem. I’m not usually expecting the remembrance. It’s something that just turns up, sometime, every year. William Stafford’s “inviting the quiet by turning the face” moves something in me deeply – over the beckoning hue and cry of the “last opportunity” cash registers. I’m waiting, the world – the whole world – is waiting for something to “touch us too from that other place.”
Listening
My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.William Stafford
Beneath the dome of the firmament, I consider.
