Where "Time is the Country." Yes. Yes"Where time is the country," you have to go out into it -- where "time is the country," wear long thick boots, prepare for bad weather, bring friends, if you can. "Where time is the country," I have to turn away from that dark page, bye and bye. Because that dark page comes from that dark mind "where all voices are not equal." To go out, to see that, indeed, it is light that casts shadows, as it attempts to dissolve all density, giving us only this awareness: the ephemerality of intangible light, and the intractibility of form. Then, a return to the page holds a light that is broad enough, coming as it does, from without, and precise enough to contain the dark brush strokes created by the scribbles from within.
Beautiful piece. The author takes me right there. I am with you, with all of us, contemplating shadow.
perfect poem to companion Karan’s “Grief and Surrealism” workshop yesterday, I can’t stop thinking about either. Thank you
Where "Time is the Country." Yes. Yes"Where time is the country," you have to go out into it -- where "time is the country," wear long thick boots, prepare for bad weather, bring friends, if you can. "Where time is the country," I have to turn away from that dark page, bye and bye. Because that dark page comes from that dark mind "where all voices are not equal." To go out, to see that, indeed, it is light that casts shadows, as it attempts to dissolve all density, giving us only this awareness: the ephemerality of intangible light, and the intractibility of form. Then, a return to the page holds a light that is broad enough, coming as it does, from without, and precise enough to contain the dark brush strokes created by the scribbles from within.
Beautiful piece. The author takes me right there. I am with you, with all of us, contemplating shadow.
This poem feels like a quiet moment of a man sitting alone with himself, aware of how much darkness a body can hold.
There’s something deeply human in the way he sits between shadows one cast on the table, the other cast inside his mind.
The outer shadow simply blurs his writing, but the inner one blurs his sense of meaning, his sense of who is truly in control.
The poem captures that fragile instant when a person realises how easily the mind can become its own dim room.
His squinting feels like a small act of courage, a human attempt to see through fear, doubt, and the weight of mortality.
The question “Does the first light hide inside the first dark?” sounds like someone searching for hope in the very place where despair begins.
There’s a tenderness in the idea that understanding might be born from darkness, that clarity might grow from confusion.
The poem recognises how the fear of death can quietly shape a life, becoming a shadow that follows every thought.
Yet the final line opens a window: even if all bodies share the same fate, each voice carries its own fragile, irreplaceable truth.
In the end, the poem becomes a meditation on being human living with shadows, reaching for light, and trying to understand the space between the two.
What a mysterious poem. Li-Young Lee is directing the reader's eye and mind.