Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

--------I played my game for keeps--
for love, for poetry,
---- and for eternal life--

---------------------------------------(from "The Testing-Tree ")


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 bloated 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.

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