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What I’ve Been Reading: Rita Dove, “All Souls'” (2004)

From The Best American Poetry: 2004, eds. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, pp. 73-74.

All Souls’

Starting up behind them,
all the voices of those they had named:
mink, gander, and marmoset,
crow and cockatiel.
Even the duck-billed platypus,
of late so quiet in its bed,
sent out a feeble cry signifying
grief and confusion, et cetera.

Of course the world had changed
for good. As it would from now on
every day, with every twitch and blink.
Now that change was de rigueur,
man would discover desire, then yearn
for what he would learn to call
distraction. This was the true loss.
And yet in that first

unchanging instant,
the two souls
standing outside the gates
(no more than a break in the hedge;
how had they missed it?) were not
thinking. Already the din was fading.
Before them, a silence
larger than all their ignorance

yawned, and this they walked into
until it was all they knew. In time
they hunkered down to business,
filling the world with sighs–
these anonymous, pompous creatures,
heads tilted as if straining
to make out the words to a song
played long ago, in a foreign land.

— Rita Dove (2004)
from The New Yorker

Rad Geek, to-day:

WHAT I’M READING: My weekend reads this weekend are mostly history, on the antebellum South and race and Texas and Tejanidad. More to come on that later. In the meantime though, also some reading on Tolkien and fantasy literature:

Shared Article from Uisio

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inheritance of Myth - Uisio - Online Maga…

May 14, 2016 In 1939, as the Nazi shadow stretched across Europe, a linguist named J.R.R. Tolkien delivered a lecture at the University of St. Andr…

uisio.com


Rad Geek, to-day:

my latest sun is sinking fast
my race is nearly run
my strongest trials now are past
my triumph has begun
oh come, angel band
come and around me stand
oh bear me away on your snow-white wings
to my immortal home

~ Ralph Stanley (1927-2016) ~

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