Two poetic openings - Wright and Levertov

On the recent theme of openings, here are two wonderful poems. To me, both speak of the possibilities of opening ourselves to deeper, richer parts of ourselves, through encounters with the natural world.

The first is by Judith Wright:

Breath

I turned to the dark window;
outside were stars and frost.
My breath went out to the night,
shaped like a cloud or a mist.
Small and soulless ghost,
what was it my heart meant
that, watching the way you went,
it moved so under my breast?

And here is Denise Levertov's A Reward. This is a beautiful poem that was originally in her collection Evening Train.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

A Reward can now be found in Denise Levertov's New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.