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We were sitting in the old wicker chairs, having tea on the screened-in porch at Crosswicks Cottage, Madeleine L'Engle's home in Connecticut. It was a warm summer day in 2002, with the Litchfield Hills carving a silhouette against the late afternoon sky. Our conversation had slowed, become desultory, in the kind of relaxed manner of friends who know from long experience how to be together, what the other person is thinking, and for whom silence is comfortable, even comforting. I was knitting. Madeleine seemed preoccupied.

Suddenly she looked up and asked, "Is your journal there in your knitting bag?"

"Yes," I answered, rescuing my battered notebook from a tangle of yarn.

"Write this down for me, will you?"

Madeleine dictated this poem, speaking slowly enough for me to scribble it onto a blank page, but without a break in thought or rhythm.

… Purple shade

Smudges the spill of light from the late day sun.

The ink will run if I cannot remember

To keep the darkness new—so easily forgot.

The night provides more light than blatant day.

What can I write that keeps the morning fresh

That hid the young cat in the row of wheat?

The reaper lacks the eyes to hold him back;

Unseeing, his sharp blade carves the damning cut

That kills without a conscious, caring thought.

He does not hear the harsh cry of the cat;

And spurting blood, and life gone like the wind.

The event of the poem was clearly a vivid memory, one that had long been at work in Madeleine's subconscious, ever-fruitful mind. It was as if the image finally found an outlet, and a place on a page.

Re-reading this poem later in The Ordering of Love: New & Selected Poems, I kept discovering things." Like its human author, a good poem is layered, not revealed all at once.

For instance, the need to keep memory fresh and re-freshened by writing it down: "The ink will run/if I cannot remember to keep the darkness new." Madeleine's personal journal and daybook, in which she wrote daily for most of her adult life, helped her to "keep the darkness new," and "the morning fresh" and guarded her ideas, and their sharp particularities, from blurring into mere abstractions. The long-ago stunning moment in its beauty and terror inform the poem as if it had just happened. The detail of "the young cat in the row of wheat" is stark and simple enough to paint a picture and prepare us for the violent conclusion of the second stanza.

The contrast between light and darkness, and the paradoxical power of darkness to clarify the truth, to inform even through anguish and suffering, reminds us of the phrase Madeleine often quoted about "the deep but dazzling darkness" of God and of supernatural reality that we struggle to understand and enter.

The vast importance for Madeleine of clear vision, and of sight and insight, utterly absent in "the reaper" who "lacks the eyes to hold him back" from bloodshed, and because of indifference and lack of awareness, is unable to avoid snuffing out a life.

And "life gone like the wind"; in the age bracket where, of late, Madeleine and I found ourselves, our mortality and the diminishment that comes with aging must be faced. All of us who were close to Madeleine in the past months are painfully aware that her life seemed to be passing like the wind.

Madeleine has always had a powerful, instinctive sense of rhythm and rhyme. Read some of her sonnets and note the flow of words and unforced, easy rhymes and rhythms sound as if that was exactly what they were always meant to be read aloud, these poems, some deeply moving, some full of humor, come to life as if they had somewhere always existed in their present form and only needed a mind and a mouthpiece and a page to bring them to our attention.

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September (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51