I
There can, we know, be only one beginning:
One moment that was first with none before;
One moment from which every other follows,
Whose meanings we shall only hear of later,
As children listen on a mother’s lap.
And it will be convulsive and abrupt,
That dense, dark center from which time unfolds.
But there come moments in a person’s life,
Whether they’re met with joy or disappointment,
That seem to echo of that first beginning
And bring with them a sense of something new,
A sense that something none has known before
Has made its first appearance in the world.
II
Imagine how it was for those aboard the ship,
The men and women cast upon the waters,
Who voyaged in their wretchedness and hunger
Beneath the wave-lashed decks. They waited there
In hopes the winds would carry them to land.
They fed on promises and fine descriptions
Of giant forests rising on the shore,
And held to them, while others fell to illness
And slipped with weighted shrouds into the sea.
How was it for them, eying the far horizon,
And catching, faintly, borne in on the breeze,
That first and unexpected scent of pine,
That sign, invisible, that land was near?
III
Imagine Reverend Edwards, in his town
Settled far inland from the port at Boston,
Its valley golden with the flames of autumn.
Imagine how he greeted the surprise,
As one by one the people set aside
Their worldly cares and gave themselves away
In bouts of penitence and hymns of praise.
Or think of that bald printer in his shop,
Bespeckled, setting out the blocks of type
In early morning darkness. Hidden there,
Within his head, lie plans for hospitals,
Societies, and colleges as yet
Unborn and yet already on their way.
IV
Or call to mind a rain-soaked Washington,
With level, compass, chain, descending down
A hillside into woodlands thick with vines.
He takes the measure of the unmapped land
As jewelers study gemstones with their loupe.
Or try, at last, to picture that pale lawyer,
Younger than most who crowded in the Statehouse,
And mute when others spoke at length and loud.
Beneath the lamp, he dips his pen in ink
To say to all the world what has till then
Been said too quietly: that we are called—
And not by man, but God—to live our lives
Within the liberty of nature’s laws.
V
From one beginning come all those beginnings.
The place brand new to us is very old,
With paths and clearings marked beneath the trees,
And leaves that blaze to tongues of flame in autumn,
Obedient to a law we have not made.
We sense that first beginning in new life,
But also in the sudden change of heart.
We sense it in the never-resting mind
That ferrets out how good things can be made.
We sense it in the proud man short on prospects
Who will become a father to his country.
And so we see it in the one who brings,
With his few words, a nation to its birth.