Tuesday, June 26, 2018

101 Poems, Number 20


Favorite Poems Throughout My Life


20: “The House,”* in New Yorker, 31 August 2009, by Richard Wilbur (1921–2017)

A painful poem to recite.
It’s saturated—soaked with love
Of five and sixty years. I fight
The tears that come, for I know of—

A little of—the pain he felt
When she, his loving wife, was gone.
And as I read this, my eyes melt.
He’d no one left to lean upon.

That image—how he sails away
To seek her every single night?
Well, this is why I still must say:
A painful poem to recite.

*A poem for his wife (Mary), who died in 2007; they’d been married for 65 years.




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