Night Letter by Stanley Kunitz The urgent letter that I try to write Night after night to you to whom I turn, The staunchless word, my language of the wound, Begins to stain the page. Here in my room With my unkenneled need, the Faustian dog That chews my penitential bones, I hope And do not hope, I pray and mock my prayer, Twisting my coils, this dangling life of mine, Now twelve years come of age, and me unpleased With all my ways, my very littlest ones, My part, my lines, unless you hold them dear. Where is your ministry? I thought I heard A piece of laughter break upon the stair Like glass, but when I wheeled around I saw Disorder, in a tall magician’s hat, Keeping his rabbit-madness crouched inside, Sit at my desk and scramble all the news. The strangest things are happening. Christ! The dead, Pushing the membrane from their face, salute The dead and scribble slogans on our walls; Phantoms and phobias mobilize, thronging The roads; and in the Bitch’s streets the men Are lying down, great crowds with fractured wills Dumping the shapeless burden of their lives Into the rivers where the motors flowed.

Of those that stood in my doorway, self-accused, Besmeared with failure in the swamps of trade, One put a gun in his examiner’s hand, Making the judgment loud; another squats Upon the asylum floor and plays with toys, Like the spiral of a souls balanced on a stone, Or a new gadget for slicing off the thumb; The rest whirl in the torment of our time. What have we done to them that what they are Shrinks from the touch of what they hoped to be? “Pardon,” I plead, clutching the fragile sleeve Of my poor father’s ghost returned to howl His wrongs. I suffer the twentieth century, The nerves of commerce wither in my arm; Violence shakes my dreams; I am cold, Chilled by the persecuting wind abroad, The oratory of the rodent’s tooth, The slaughter of the blue-eyed open towns, And principle disgraced, and art denied. My dear, is it too late for peace, too late For men to gather at the wells to drink The sweet water; too late for fellowship And laughter at the forge; too late for us To say, “Let us be good to one another”? The lamps go singly out; the valley sleeps; I tend the last light shining on the farms And keep for you the thought of love alive, As scholars dungeoned in an ignorant age Tended the embers of the Trojan fire. Cities shall suffer siege and some shall fall, But man’s not taken. What the deep heart means, Its message of the big, round, childish hand, Its wonder, its simple lonely cry, The bloodied envelope addressed to you, Is history, that wide and mortal pang.