Daily Sip - The Indigo Bunting

The Indigo Bunting

I go to the door often.
Night and summer. Crickets
lift their cries.
I know you are out.
You are driving
late through the summer night.

I do not know what will happen.
I have no claim on you.
I am one star
you have as guide; others
love you, the night
so dark over the Azores.

You have been working outdoors,
gone all week. I feel you
in this lamp lit
so late. As I reach for it
I feel myself
driving through the night.

I love a firmness in you
that disdains the trivial
and regains the difficult.
You become part then
of the firmness of night,
the granite holding up walls.

There were women in Egypt who
supported with their firmness the stars
as they revolved,
hardly aware
of the passage from night
to day and back to night.

I love you where you go
through the night, not swerving,
clear as the indigo
bunting in her flight,
passing over two
thousand miles of ocean.

- Robert Bly
The New Yorker, August 29, 1983, p. 34

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Minnesota's Poet Laureate

That is quite a lovely read, and I had never read it before. Thanks for bringing it to attention.

I hadn't either! I thought I should read up on my state's poets.

This poem makes me think of a hot summer evening. Dew and bugs and fireflies, a long hour thinking of your lover.

Most intriguing in its ambiguity.