Antonio Machado – “Is My Soul Asleep?”

As I’ve been unable (so far) to shake off the persistent writer’s block with which I’ve been saddled since my accident last October, I thought today would be as good a time as any to share the following poem by Antonio Machado, which appears in Robert Bly’s 1999 anthology The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures:

Is My Soul Asleep?

Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.

Antonio Machado

These periods when I am not writing, when I seem to be unable to write, are always difficult for me, and I do feel at times as if my soul is asleep, or has left me somehow. Those angels with whom I was wrestling not so long ago seem very far away from me now, and I miss them.

The Antonio Machado – “Is My Soul Asleep?” by Rick Belden, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.