"Here"
Stephen Dunn
Maybe this world
is another planet's Hell.
--Aldous Huxley
Sometimes it feels otherworldly, what I've felt,
my heart residing in its own peculiar dark,
or suddenly aglow, lit up from within.
I sense then I'm on one of the good planets
where mistakes and wild, venal joys
lead to ordinary suffering, not banishment or doom.
Whatever we must endure,
doesn't it take place closer to home?
I know how I feel about murderers or men
with lollipops who lead children into the woods.
Still, eternal damnation doesn't do
anyone any good. Most of us pay now
for what we do and have done, or slide
like the poor and the helpless toward
the slammed gavel of a fate. That's enough, I say
out loud to no one in any world. Yet here
and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible
with struggle or luck. More than once I've walked
under the sun and beneath the luminous moon
not knowing what or whom to thank.
On this day in...
2011:
"My Name" by Mark Strand2010:
"Late Night" by Margaret Atwood2009:
"Eclipse" by Chana Bloch2008: Weekend, no poem
2007:
"A Broken Appointment" by Thomas Hardy there will be fireflies/& stars