TO CHARLES WILLIAMS
Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard
To see plainly or record truly. The new light imposes change,
Re-adjusts all a life-landscape as it thrusts down its probe from the sky,
To create shadows, to reveal waters, to erect hills and deepen glens.
The slant alters. I can’t see the old contours. It’s a larger world
Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on the ridge.
Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of spring?
A hard question and worth talking a whole night on. But with whom?
Of who now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death
Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless—oh unless it were you?
*
One last poem by C. S. Lewis. I decided to post this because we have been talking about Williams’s books.
I don’t have much to say about this other than it would make me cry to read aloud.
It’s a very odd poem for Lewis, in that it neither rhyme nor meter.
AMDG
—Janet Cupo is a great-grandmother (and a great grandmother) on temporary (maybe) sabbatical from the workaday world.
Light On Dark Water 
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