Thank you to everyone that joined us today for yoga where we closed our practice with this beautiful poem by Tomlinson to reflect on the power of pausing to observe stillness.
Farewell to Van Gogh
The quiet deepens. You will not persuade
One leaf of the accomplished, steady, darling
Chestnut-tower to displace itself
With more of violence than the air supplies
When, gathering dusk, the pond brims evenly
And we must be content with stillness.
Unhastening, daylight withdraws from us its shapes
Into their central calm. Stone by stone
Your rhetoric is dispersed until the earth
Becomes once more the earth, the leaves
A sharp partition against cooling blue.
Farewell, and for your instructive frenzy
Gratitude. The world does not end tonight
And the fruit that we shall pick tomorrow
Await us, weighing the unstripped bough.
Charles Tomlinson 1960
Farewell to Van Gogh
The quiet deepens. You will not persuade
One leaf of the accomplished, steady, darling
Chestnut-tower to displace itself
With more of violence than the air supplies
When, gathering dusk, the pond brims evenly
And we must be content with stillness.
Unhastening, daylight withdraws from us its shapes
Into their central calm. Stone by stone
Your rhetoric is dispersed until the earth
Becomes once more the earth, the leaves
A sharp partition against cooling blue.
Farewell, and for your instructive frenzy
Gratitude. The world does not end tonight
And the fruit that we shall pick tomorrow
Await us, weighing the unstripped bough.
Charles Tomlinson 1960
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