There was a dead tree in the woods
whose two remaining limbs sprang upward
in semblance of a lyre.
And now
one has snapped off. What remains
cannot signify.
O Orpheus,
lend me power to sing
the unheard music of that vanished lyre.
Denise Levertov
A prolific poet and essayist, Denise Levertov was the author of more than twenty books, the last of which were A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), The Sands of the Well (1996), The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature (1997), and The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes (1997). She taught for many years at Stanford University and died in 1997 at the age of 74.
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