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Title: Digging for China by Richard Wilbur
Post by: mousafiris on 09 Mar, 2007, 09:04:48
Richard Wilbur, Digging for China

"Far enough down is China," somebody said.
"Dig deep enough and you might see the sky
As clear as at the bottom of a well.
Except it would be real–a different sky.
Then you could burrow down until you came
To China! Oh, it's nothing like New Jersey.
There's people, trees, and houses, and all that,
But much, much different. Nothing looks the same."

I went and got the trowel out of the shed
And sweated like a coolie all that morning,
Digging a hole beside the lilac-bush,
Down on my hands and knees. It was a sort
Of praying, I suspect. I watched my hand
Dig deep and darker, and I tried and tried
To dream a place where nothing was the same.
The trowel never did break through to blue.

Before the dream could weary of itself
My eyes were tired of looking into darkness,
My sunbaked head of hanging down a hole.
I stood up in a place I had forgotten,
Blinking and staggering while the earth went round
And showed me silver barns, the fields dozing
In palls of brightness, patens growing and gone
In the tides of leaves, and the whole sky china blue.
Until I got my balance back again
All that I saw was China, China, China.





Richard Purdy Wilbur  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilbur) (born March 1, 1921) is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.

(https://www.translatum.gr/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.poetryfoundation.org%2Fuploads%2Fauthors%2Frichard-wilbur%2F448x%2Frichard-wilbur.jpg&hash=20a6688e8cf7b6a908b964e6f78070ce8973f5e4)
Richard Purdy Wilbur
  image source (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/richard-wilbur)

Poems published in Translatum


More poems by Richard Wilbur
 Poem Hunter  (http://www.poemhunter.com/richard-wilbur/poems/)




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