Saturday, May 2, 2015

Here Sits the Unicorn

When I was in my twenties, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the woman I aspired to be: kind and humble and thoughtful and grateful and genuine and introspective and inquisitive and above reproach. I had read her first book Bring Me a Unicorn that told about her life as a very young woman. Little did I know at the time--because I hadn't read her subsequent books--that things were not as they seemed. Her life with a certain man named Charles did not turn out as she had fantasied it would. I can only speculate about why she wrote this poem and what it meant to her, but I know exactly what it meant to me.

Here sits the Unicorn 

Here sits the Unicorn
In captivity
His bright invulnerability
Captive at last

Here sits the Unicorn
In captivity
Yet free

He could leap the corral
If he rose
To his full height
He could splinter the fencing light
With three blows
Of his porcelain hoofs in flight 
If he chose.
He could shatter his prison wall
Could escape them all 
If he rose
If he chose

Here sits the Unicorn
The wounds in his side
Still bleeding
Dream wounds, dream ties
Do not bind him there
In a kingdom where
He is unaware
Of his wounds, of his snare

Here sits the Unicorn
Leashed by a chain of gold
To the pomegranate tree
So light a chain to hold
So fierce a beast
Delicate as a cross at rest
On a maiden's breast
He could snap the golden chain
With one toss of his mane
If he chose to move
If he chose to prove
His liberty
But he does not choose
What choice would lose
He stays, the Unicorn
In captivity

Yet look again 
His horn is free
Rising above chain, fence, and tree
Free hymn of love; His horn
Bursts from his tranquil brow
Like a comet born
Cleaves like a galley's prow
Into seas untorn
Springs like a lily, white
From the Earth below
Spirals, a bird in flight
To a longed-for height
Or a fountain bright
Spurting to light
Of early morn 
O luminous horn

Here sits the Unicorn 
In captivity?
In repose
Forgotten the strife
Now the need to kill
Has died like fire
And the need to love
Has replaced desire

Quiet, the Unicorn
In contemplation stilled
With acceptance filled
Quiet, save for his horn
Alive in his horn
Horizontally
In captivity
Perpendicularly
Free.

                                                          --Anne Morrow Lindbergh
                            1955

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