Guest Poet: Margaret Robison

I only happened to stumble across this poem because the poet herself passed away, and her son John Elder Robison posted it as the last poem in her collection. In this moment, it is my favorite poem of all time.

You can find her memoir here: Margaret Robison's THE LONG JOURNEY HOME: A MEMOIR

All the characters in the novel have gone to sleep.

They got bored with the monotony of eyes

going back and forth on page after page.

What you are reading now are their dreams.

But the trees — how kind and compassionate they are

to continue to shade us with their thick, luxuriant greens.

And all the creatures that love us —

Dogs with the ever-wagging tails,

and the cautious cats who dare to love us, sometimes

with reserve and at a distance.

The little birds.

Once a man loved me and gave me two sons,

but that’s another story.

What an abundance of love there is —

love like blades of grass rising from the earth,

like the most delicate flowers

and the most resilient weeds.

Love that spills from the sky like rain

answering the thirsty earth’s yearning.

How generous life is to love us

even when we refuse to wake

from our dreams in which cruelty resides

along with fear and guilt and grief;

dreams in which we stumble, get up,

and stumble again, never daring

to open our eyes once and for all to finally hear

the applause of those for whom the play is over,

those for whom real life has finally begun

~~ Margaret Robison