Friday, August 12, 2011

Poetry Friday: The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
--Mark Strand

My friend Karen Edmisten is hosting Poetry Friday today; click over to her for more.

Above:  Children Playing, Arthur Bowen Davies, c. 1896

6 comments:

MrsDarwin said...

Oh, so beautiful. Thank you.

maria horvath said...

Isn't Mark Strand just the best?

There's always more than meets the eye in his poems. I love to read them out loud, to understand fully what he is saying.

Pentimento said...

He's pretty great.

GatheringBooks said...

These are my favorite lines:
Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know.

- made me sigh. Thank you for sharing.

Karen Edmisten said...

Oooh, that took my breath. Beautiful.

Someone said...

this poetry was so great!