Life &Poetry Entropy | 16 May 2009
I Am Learning To Abandon the World
Poet Linda Pastan draws on experiences of daily life and of nature to create direct poems in a spare and engaging voice. Family experience—ordinary stories of husband and wife, of child and parent—are transformed in her poems to prisms for deep human themes, loss, growth, and the fragility of life.
I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.
But morning comes with small
reprieves of coffee and birdsong.
A tree outside the window
which was simply shadow moments ago
takes back its branches twig
by leafy twig.
And as I take my body back
the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap
as if to make amends.
© By Linda Pastan.
on 16 May 2009 at 12:01 pm 1.nishith said …
Oh….
How well put… exactly the same feelings I have these days in this city of Mumbai.
Morbid structures, crowded places, noisy ambiance,
City captured by lust and greed
Attacked by savage beasts dressed as humans
Timeless souls in captivity
- NISH
on 19 May 2009 at 1:29 am 2.michele roohani said …
From deep blue to warm orange/yellow, she takes us from mild despair to mild hope— I am thankful for that glimmer of sunlight and birdsong.
Thank you Ajay for sharing.