Too much scowling President
and too few faces
softened with love close-by
have left me jittery and profligate,
amazoning my way out
of that tepid agony, rethinking whatever,
when I should have been sleeping,
but who can sleep?
So maybe come morning
I'll give up to spring snow
like a new beginning,
and come noon there will be joy
hung from the mailbox—
anything, anything,
arriving from a land of plenty
in its golden age of which
the adults would not approve.
Forgive me my anti-griefs.
I'm piling them up,
like the dandelion singing by the well,
like the bullfrog's astonishing arc
into the pond as I pass,
like my own tracks through the yard,
proof I am here, and this is real—
The noisy solace of blackbirds
roosted in the trees by the roofless silo
standing bereft of its barn,
the sunset in blue clouds behind the hill—
all of this needed now,
For it is not a new beginning,
nothing is finished,
and the adults are all dead,
only the chidren are left,
alone, growing old.
—last four lines from Louise Glück’s “A Warm Dsy”
—title from a poem by Marianne Boruch
