ride out of worlds we shall not see again

As it turns out, being on a 10-hour train trip mostly without internet (no internet for people traveling to Canada, because Canada hates me) is sort of great, but also super frustrating. At the moment I am hiding out in the cafe car with a cup of terrible coffee and semi-functional internet, so here is today's poem:

Riding the black express from heaven to hell
He bit his fingers, watched the countryside,
Vernal and crystalline, forever slide
Beyond his gaze: the long cascades that fell
Ribboned in sunshine from their sparkling height,
The fishers fastened to their pools of green
By silver lines; the birds in sudden flight—
All things the diabolic eye had seen
Since heaven's cockcrow. Imperceptibly
That landscape altered: now in paler air
Tree, hill and rock stood out resigned, severe,
Beside the strangled field, the stream run dry.

Lucifer, we are yours you stiff and mute
Ride out of worlds we shall not see again,
And watch from widows of a smoking train
The ashen prairies of the absolute.
Once out of heaven, to an angel's eye
Where is the bush or cloud without a flaw?
What bird but feeds upon mortality,
Flies to its young with carrion in its claws?
O foundered angel, first and loneliest
To this bitter sand beneath your hoe,
Teach us, the newly-landed, what you know;
After our weary transit, find us rest.

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "Lucifer in the Train," originally published (possibly -- I only sort of trust the research I did to find this out) in The Atlantic Monthly, September 1952.

I think maybe my favorite thing about Adrienne Rich's poetry is how seamlessly she manages to integrate the intensely horrible and the intensely beautiful. I find this poem sort of shockingly optimistic, given that it's technically a poem about hell.