From his website:

‘In Robert Bly’s numerous roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called “the expressive men’s movement,” Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half century.

What is it about Bly and his ideas that inspires such impassioned responses from readers and associates? The psychologist Robert Moore believes that “When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution.”

And literary critic Charles Molesworth suggests that some of Bly’s importance and complication lies in the fact that he “writes religious meditations for a public that is no longer ostensibly religious.”‘

Enjoy!

—

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!”
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, “”You are my Lord!” How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

- Robert Bly

This is from a sequence of 48 poems in the book entitled The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, each of them 18 lines long, which are based loosely on the Islamic ghazal form.

In its classic form, each stanza stands alone–has its own landscape, so to speak–and the theme of the poem is never stated so the reader has much more to do than s/he would be used to in the contemporary English poem. When the ghazal has its full development, each stanza in a given poem ends with the same word.