Poems — Dr. Robert Kral

A Quieter Voice

In Verse

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Across the years, between the pressed plant specimens and the field notebooks, Robert Kral wrote poems. Some were polished and finished; others remain as fragments — first lines and final thoughts that speak as clearly today as the day they were set down.

What follows is a small gathering of his verse — transcribed from his original manuscripts, with each handwritten or typed page preserved alongside.

The Completed Poems

Verses, finished and signed.

Four poems that survive in finished form — the earliest from his time in the Marshall Islands as a young Marine, the latest a meditation on words and stars.

1944 · Marshall Islands

Coral

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To be free, a dogmatic phrase, Bound as we be Into one tight indivisible molecule, Or better as a colony of tiny coral polyps, That together form a whole, Yet individuals of their creation; Each in his tiny shell apart; But bound, One to the other.

The earliest dated poem in the collection, written when he was barely twenty, while serving in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific.

Original typed manuscript of the poem Coral, 1944, Marshall Islands

— Click to view original —

1954

Stars

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The gentle snow I knew is now old. The night is clear and fiercely cold, And I shudder beneath the stare, translucent glare of ice; then turn to watch the moon and stars to inward turn again And think of words. Words that lie beyond my reach, That could be mine someday if I could stretch the hungry, palsied fingers of my mind One span more, that each subtlety would come to me, A man condemned to know enough to know, How short description is and far From truth it lies. Could I surmise the distance to one star, Transcribe a journey to this point of light, Would such words or numbers bring it near? Or, after telling, is it just as far? It seems the words we have, each heavy as a leaden bar, By each narrative increase our mighty plight, Take us nearer to a starless night.

Original typed manuscript of the poem Stars, 1954

— Click to view original —

Undated

The Hardened Pellet

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I spoke one word A hardened pellet that rolled without thought Frantically I sought to hold To grasp this unpremeditated heavy thing But it was slippery and cold And so I say a word once passed Is, lost beyond recall Reach not, for it Lest you too should fall

Original handwritten manuscript of the poem The Hardened Pellet

— Click to view original —

Undated

Night

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When chill autumn consumes the fields and winter dons the warmth coats of the warmthless fire eternal Summer does not entirely yield The Song of Eden still is heard Above the rising winds Though men beget they ill may die And wickedness becomes a law That spawns a darkness in the sky That spirit still will sing That sang so long ago And from the sterile non-committal snow an unconquerable flow a thing of beauty

A meditation on the persistence of beauty in winter. The original page bears several revisions in his hand.

Original handwritten manuscript of the poem Night

— Click to view original —

Fragments

Pieces left unfinished.

Drafts and beginnings — verses that trail off mid-line or mid-thought, preserved here as he left them. They are no less his for being incomplete.

Unfinished

Undated

Wanderlust

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There are a few people among us who would be outcasts. Some people never grow older. From the beginning the unknown has fascinated man. Witness the insatiable curiosity of a child — the supreme wisdom they show — to know what lies beyond the obvious. Wanderlust lives in youth. All paths lead to mystic places then. There is interest and a touch of adventure in everything they see or do, and —

Trails off mid-sentence. A meditation on the spirit of wandering, written in the prose-poem style he sometimes used.

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Unfinished

Undated · "Intro"

A Tapestry of Green and Gold

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I wove a tapestry of green and gold and unforeseen, the work was lost The story that the patterns told May now be warped and tossed Upon a foreign sea of mind. Perhaps I'll find the —

Headed simply "Intro" — this fragment seems to have been intended as the opening of a longer piece.

— Click to view original —

Unfinished

Undated

I Must Write Again

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I must write again though in my brain their teems a maze of words not my own words which fructify and stain A sheer consciousness Are age and truth allied? Are all conception-bound? or do they —

A poem about the act of writing itself — and the inheritance of the words one is given. Trails off at the line "or do they —"

Original handwritten manuscript of the unfinished piece I Must Write Again

— Click to view original —

Fragment

Undated

A Universal Soul-Shaped Mind

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— will come a universal soul-shaped mind From which the first long summer came which once was lost and had not faith to find

A short fragment that begins mid-sentence — likely the continuation of another page now lost.

Original handwritten manuscript of the fragment A Universal Soul-Shaped Mind

— Click to view original —

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"Words that lie beyond my reach, that could be mine someday if I could stretch the hungry, palsied fingers of my mind one span more..."

From the poem "Stars" · 1954