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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan
Born in 1919 in Oakland, California, Robert Duncan began writing poetry as a teenager in Bakersfield. Despite his affiliation with several major movements in American poetry of the fifties and sixties, Duncan forged a style uniquely his own...
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Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow  
by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.



by Robert Duncan, from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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