Others' Words (The Thursday Edition)

I guess I am making up for lost time (and letting everyone know they can breathe a sigh of relief: I did not eat the left over sandwich). I really have nothing to write about this evening, but I've been thinking about this poem I read for the first time today. It's by the late Stanley Kunitz, a former US Poet Laureate who died in 2006, a centenarian. I remember reading a Kunitz poem to my class the day that I read the news that he died. I think they might have been more interested in the fact that he was 100. Anyway, it hit me in a good way, today, and, so, I present it to you. Here it is.

The Round

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words
I scribbled on the blotted page:
"Light splashed . . ."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.