How a song can begin

September 15, 1982

I had a vision small and brief - but clear as a single star's disclosure of itself before again being quenched in darkest air. All night I watched for it to reappear. Until - with hope brought to so low an ebb it seemed gone as a saving spring can go quite underground, at a sricken hour - suddenly there was a voice that might have come, thundering as of old from some veiled mount, to those slow Children there below - the fearful, the faltering the rebellious ones: quibbling with each summons to their own blazed role - A voice that called ''Suppose in some accursed, unvisited place some netherworld inhabited by benighted shades, you'd never even heard, never even dared in yourself to dream, that stars exist!'' Then here? Tonight? How cosmic a shock it would have been! With that one glimpse, that pinprick start, enough - O more than enough! - to blast all Hades apart.