MY NAME

One night when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become-and where I would find myself-
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

--Mark Strand


This is one of many datura in bloom at my home - Photos cannot
capture the beauty of these huge, pale lavender blossoms, such as
Georgia O'Keeffe painted. I understand now why she was so taken with them.