In the Far North Country
in the early dark, when thunder unrolls
across the lake and in its wake
there comes a pause into which
time pours and is erased
for only a heartbeat, but long enough
for the heart to discern the hidden name
of what has been lost,
it’s then,
as the rain’s muffled hush returns
to brush again the darkened earth,
affirming the truth of time and space,
that sometimes,
it comes back to me,
a memory of the afterlife.
The Ancient of Days
i.
After the plague, there followed the floods,
the hurricane’s fury, the rage of flames,
alternating seasons of greed and hunger.
Fear and anger were as common as ever,
the heart’s rancor, the ache
of despair.
Meanwhile, the moon. Faithfully
dreaming, for four and a half billion years,
her one dream of feast and famine.
Below her, Earth’s oceans rise and fall
to her pull. Lower still, sharks patrol—
dispassionate, slow,
in the cold, in the dark, cloaked
in a lifespan five hundred years long.
Theirs, too, is an ancient endurance.
Above, we have little idea of their lives.
They move in the realm of our vast
unknowing.
ii.
Reading The Book of Daniel, I’m struck
by the haunting name he assigns
to his god: The Ancient of Days.
For years, I’ve been trying out names
for my own god, tasting and tonguing,
hoping to come upon one I could live with,
but none has yet fit the socket of my longing.
Once I stood in the hush of sequoias
and thought I heard whispers
floating above me—a trove
of hermetic secrets kept through a lifetime
three thousand years long—
and I understood nothing.
iii.
How inconsequential it seems,
human knowledge. Scientists tell us
that deep-sea sponges—some of them
born as the last ice age ended—
twelve thousand years ago—may hold
the key to eternal life.
I can’t imagine eternity.
Hard enough to imagine
tomorrow.
It could be that time itself is
The Ancient of Days, a barnacled holiness
studded with creaturely comings and goings,
random beginnings and manifold endings.
One of these endings, we know,
will be ours.
Sharks, sequoias, deep-sea sponges,
all these will attend our passing.
I doubt Earth will miss us.
iv.
The Ancient of Days.
Was Daniel hoping to ease the relentless
unfolding of Time
when he offered his God the beauty
of words? Not a bad plan, on the whole—
our most persuasive proof
of worth, our most durable armor.
Still, our finest words will die
as the last of our kind passes from Earth.
Doing my best to imagine that silence,
I touch the edge of a holiness glad
to remain nameless
that it may be always with us.
Always. Another beautiful word, filled
with ever-widening reaches:
the realm of our vast unknowing
kept whole. Kept.
Like a Sabbath.
Marjorie Stelmach is the author of eight volumes of poems, most recently, The Angel of Absolute Zero (Cascade, 2022) and The Saints of Repetition (Grayson Books, 2025). In addition to Innisfree, her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Water-Stone Review, and others.
Innisfree 43
A Closer Look: