Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield

Come, Thief
by Jane Hirschfield

The mandarin silence of windows before their view,
like guards who nod to every visitor,
“Pass.”

“Come, thief,”
the path to the doorway agrees.

A fire requires its own conflagration.
As birth does. As love does.
Saying to time to the end, “Dear one, enter.”

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Everything requires its own conflagration, time entering in, welcoming what takes. This teaching on non-resistance to loss is one of the hardest and most beautiful there is. This is for the reckoning, the taking that is also somehow the requirement of the thing being taken — when fire needs its own burning, when birth needs its own breaking, when love needs its own consummation that is also its undoing.

Hirshfield, Come, Thief. The title poem of Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011)