My Name
Warm summer nights are a long way off, both behind in memory and ahead in anticipation. But for some reason I found Mark Strand’s evocative description of one such night speak to me. Part of it, I think, is that I’ve had similar moments while laying atop a snowbank at night – more in tune with the current season, though probably not as long as one might lay in the summer! – where the skies unfolded above, cold, dark, and yet pierced with light, and felt like the heavens were calling my name. But I like Strand’s poem also because we each, I suspect, have experienced those moments of hushed silence that can fall anytime and anywhere when all of a sudden you feel caught up into something bigger, something grander, than you could have imagined.
Strand, born in 1934, was U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990 and is known for using concrete, plain, even simple language to evoke lush and at times surreal experiences of the larger world. I hope that as you read it you might find a moment’s hush in between the holiday that was and those that are coming to imagine yourself, laying out on a starry summer night, looking skyward and being called by the heavens to something grand and beautiful.
“My Name”
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.
Mark Strand, “My Name,” from Man and Camel: Poems
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