April 13: Ellen Bryant Voigt, "The Bat," Let It Be

The Bat

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Reading in bed, full of sentiment

for the mild evening and the children

asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them

cry out now and then the brief reports

of sufficient imagination, and listening

at the same time compassionately

to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble

in the chimney—

                      then it was out,

not a trapped bird

beating at the seams of the ceiling,

but a bat lifting toward us, falling away.

Dominion over every living thing,

large brain, a choice of weapons—

Shuddering, in the lit hall

we swung repeatedly against

its rising secular face

until it fell; then

shoveled it into the yard for the cat

who shuttles easily between two worlds.

____________________


I love the calm contemplation that exists in this poem.  All the world present, with meaning.  But it's a meaning that's illusive, too, like most important things in life.  Reading.  Bed.  Children.  House.  Bat.  Cat.  It's all significant, in a grand, mysterious way.

I have nothing to add to the conversation of Voigt's poem, which sort of lifts up and down, beats at the ceiling above my head right now.  It's all there in her words.  To try to interpret or place myself in the lines would violate its beauty and import, I think.

As the Beatles sang, Saint Marty is just going to let it be.