Juggler

Here's a poem that was given to me some time back. Unfortunately, there is no author credited on this photo-copied piece of paper I was given. If you know who wrote this, by all means let me know. Regardless, once I post this here I can toss the paper and keep it from traveling from drawer to drawer. ;)

UPDATE: Golfwidow was kind enough to find the author (Richard Wilbur) and send a link for info about the guy. So I'll credit him appropriately here and hope you'll all head out to buy a copy of his Collected Poems 1943 - 2003

Juggler

Richard Wilbur (from Ceremony, 1950)

A ball will bounce, but less and less. It's not

A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.

Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls

So in our hearts from brilliance,

Settles and is forgot.

It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air

The balls roll round, wheel on his wheeling hands,

Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres

Grazing his fingers ends,

Cling to their courses there,

Swinging a small heaven about his ears.

But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all

Than the earth regained, and still and sole within

The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble

He reels that heaven in,

Landing it ball by ball,

And trades is all for a broom, a plate, a table.

Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's

Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls

On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:

The boys stamp, and the girls

Shriek, and the drum booms

And all comes down, and he bows and says good-bye.

If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands

In the dust again, if the table starts to drop

Through the daily dark again, and though the plate

Lies flat on the table top,

For him we batter our hands

Who has won for once over the world's weight.