This great, much needed poem is a potent antidote to despair. I’m also using it to celebrate
12 years for Poem of the Month. According to Kaveh Akbar: “…bewilderment is at the core
of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder.”
Is this, then, why we don’t perhaps despair forever?
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses —
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.
Copyrighted material, for educational/therapeutic purposes only.
“…the miraculous that comes so close…wild in our breast for centuries?”
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