A Meditation on a Marriage

August 6, 2020 4:15 PM

It's a poem, written by Ursula K. Le Guin. I need it and I can't seem to find it. Help.

I just saw The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin with my fiance. I fell in love with this poem (A Meditation on a Marriage). I would love to translate it as a gift for the aforementioned fiance. My Google-fu has failed me. It should be included in Wild Oats and Fireweed: New Poems. Can somebody help me, please?

posted by madamepsychosis to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Best answer:

From my California, my great land
of gold and complications, wilderness,
enormous cities built on faults,
austere, bizarre, and inexhaustible
vineyards, valleys crowded with visions,

to your Georgia of red dirt
farms, where trees are all one green,
a bony piny sandy silence,
your Georgia of slow rivers, graves,
islands, that quiet place,

how could I come with all my California?

I see them come with open hands,
transparent, sharing everything,
giving and cleaving, nothing kept,
the emigrants that leave their motherland
for love and never look behind.

But if I would how could I give you
California? And I have to live
there, working the creeks my veins for gold.
Or you, could you leave Georgia,
leaving your bones behind,
and give me more than silence?

So we have made these no-one’s-lands
by meeting where we never know

when we shall meet or not,
like spies or pioneers,
telling the news in low voices
down in the willow coulees
in a grey evening, inland.

We met at sea, we married
in a foreign language: what wonder
if we cross a continent on foot
each time to find each other
at secret borders, bringing
of all my streams and darknesses of gold
and your deep graves and islands
a feather
a flake of mica
a willow leaf
that is our country,
ours alone.

~Ursala K. Le Guin
posted by solitary dancer at 5:23 PM on August 6, 2020 [26 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks a lot, solitary dancer!
posted by madamepsychosis at 5:33 PM on August 6, 2020

And if anyone want to watch The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, it's streaming on Kanopy.
posted by ShooBoo at 7:36 PM on August 6, 2020 [3 favorites]