Assurance, by Bill Stafford

Hello Poets,
The Bill Stafford poem below "seemed to be a way we could raise our faces and talk back to the darkness around us."
Following his sudden death in 1993 "Assurance" was sent to hundreds of his friends and readers.
Thanks to the many of you who inquired about missing the Monday Poems. It was the combined effects of my electronic ineptitude and the demands of spring gardening.
Best,
Sam

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names- and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles- you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head-
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

by William Stafford, from Smoke’s Way, 1983