"a look as of music"

The exuberant first section (I want to say movement) of Muriel Rukeyser's poem "Käthe Kollwitz." One of those pieces of wordcraft between whose lines I have to stop and close my eyes because my bones are aching, or my soul — some part of me I haven't identified yet.

n.b. Faust, in case you don't know, is a mythical German figure who made a pact with the devil in order to gain knowledge of all things.


Held between wars
my lifetime
                     among wars, the big hands of the world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.

The faces of the sufferers
in the street, in dailiness,
their lives showing
through their bodies
a look as of music
the revolutionary look
that says I am in the world
to change the world
my lifetime
is to love to endure to suffer the music
to set its portrait
up as a sheet of the world
the most moving the most alive
Easter and bone
and Faust walking among flowers of the world
and the child alive within the living woman, music of man,
and death holding my lifetime between great hands
the hands of enduring life
that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time,
and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands
may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for
the unknown person
held in the two hands, you.

- Muriel Rukeyser
from "Käthe Kollwitz"

Poetry Friday roundup at A Year of Reading