On The Light In The Night Sky

This piece by James Dickey reminds me of the 1998 animated short, Bunny, which  won over 25 international awards, namely, the First Prize title at the International Children's Cinema. Similar to Pixar's Up, Bunny serves as an exploration of life and death, while focusing on events that surround the  passing of the title character's companion.
 
 There is a beautiful scene in which moths flying at a light bulb are juxtaposed with the  widely held idea that one "heads" into a great light as their soul passes over.
 
I don't know if it's images of the moths in this poem, or perhaps the it's simply the hints at the quest for meaning and mission that makes me connect these two, but I feel that there is a definite common resonance.
 
I strongly recommend you check it out at the You Tube Link Here:
 

The Strength of Fields

a childhood dream iii by ~yusufartun on deviantart

 James L. Dickey

 

... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ...
Van Gennep: Rites de Passage

Moth-force a small town always has,

Given the night.

What field-forms can be,
Outlying the small civic light-decisions over
A man walking near home?
Men are not where he is
Exactly now, but they are around him around him like the strength

Of fields. The solar system floats on
Above him in town-moths.
Tell me, train-sound,
With all your long-lost grief,
what I can give.
Dear Lord of all the fields
what am I going to do?
Street-lights, blue-force and frail
As the homes of men, tell me how to do it how
To withdraw how to penetrate and find the source
Of the power you always had
light as a moth, and rising
With the level and moonlit expansion
Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

You? I? What difference is there? We can all be saved

By a secret blooming. Now as I walk
The night and you walk with me we know simplicity
Is close to the source that sleeping men
Search for in their home-deep beds.
We know that the sun is away we know that the sun can be conquered
By moths, in blue home-town air.
The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under
The pastures. They look on and help. Tell me, freight-train,
When there is no one else
To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea
Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,
Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar
Like the profound, unstoppable craving
Of nations for their wish.
Hunger, time and the moon:

The moon lying on the brain
as on the excited sea as on
The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake
With purpose. Wild hope can always spring
From tended strength. Everything is in that.
That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord
Of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start:
With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
Than save every sleeping one
And night-walking one

Of us.
My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.
 
Bunny

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