I have indeed read Savage Beauty, as well as Jean Gould’s The Poet and Her Book and Daniel Epstein’s What Lips My Lips Have Kissed. ESVM led such a fascinating life.

It seems deeply sad and reflective to me. Especially finding it carefully tucked just before the new year at the end of what felt like a long decade. Combined with yesterday’s poem, about an experience honestly too familiar to me at least, both those poems set out quite a serious note.

A contrast to traditional celebrations, too, since here we are on the eve of a new year, experiencing that recuring moment of renewed hopes and fresh resolutions. Can we dare, once more, to reclaim our deathless childhood optimism? And once again partake in that yearly ritual setting our hopes in bold and stark relief against challanging times ahead?

Yes. Why not?

So let me add a New Year’s wish, taken from a stanza of Rumi:

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

So in the coming year, may we all find a brief moment of vision when inspiration dances inside our chests. And perhaps a worthy poem or two. I never expect them to be common, but let’s hope there’s at least a few that are enduring.

“To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak”