"Sweetness," by Stephen Dunn
Here, have a perfect poem for these troubling times. It seems that each week, sometimes each day, someone I know is losing someone, something important. I can't read the news the past few weeks, I just can't; I'm numb and in denial about it all. I have not yet begun to assimilate, to mourn. But there are other things than loss to life, of course, even if it is hard to see it some days. Stephen Dunn is absolutely one of my favorite poets, and this is why:
Sweetness
Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac
with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world
except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving
someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.
I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet...
Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low
and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief
until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care
where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.
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