This is the fire of living, the fire of being alive.
It starts up in the eyes–
We wake and the map of sleep is burning.
It is useless to look for the proper book.
The cricket in the woodpile is testing his long legs.
S.K.
Morning Poem
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Planet of the Blind 
Well, OK, hmmm, maybe I read more poetry than I think that I do. Your line, “We wake and the map of sleep is burning.” had me thinking about the last bit of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which I will reproduce here, not for your benefit, SK, but for the rest of us, who typically dabble only fleetingly in the world of poetry:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I’ve walked around and around this bit, and it makes more sense to me as my viewpoint has broadened with age. If it’s true, then every golden drop of sweetness is a strange and wondrous fabrication.
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As you know, SK, I am not a poet. My recent communications with poetryfoundation.org centered around a found photograph of their founder Harriet Monroe in Ken Burns “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”, for which they thanked me mightily. I reconized her because she wrote a dedication poem for LeConte Memorial Lodge when it first opened in Yosemite. I remembered her from a volunteer stint that I did at that location about five years ago. So, no, poetry is generally not my thang.
But the poem that you posted today evoked the memory of another poem that, over the course of a 10-year career as Braille Institute’s Recording Coordinator during the 1980s, I must have heard read by about a jillion potential recording volunteers. It was John Keats’ “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket”. I had originally chosen the poem for part of the reading test used to select recording volunteers. I selected it from an anthology of writing that a friend of my mother’s put together. I selected it because Muriel’s intro to the poem, which was part of the requested narration, described Keats’ lyrics as “among the best in the language”. With that endorsement, I figured that no one would challenge the selection if they flunked the reading test. Who was the best narrator by my estimation? The actor George Dzundza. When I heard his narration, I said, “That’s it!” So here is the poem that I have heard read by a jillion people:
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
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