[hardy-l] Birthday poem

[Bill Morgan]

Here's another take on Hardy's birthday (his actual day of birth, as it
turns out), from Bob Mezey.  This poem, by the way, appears, along with
Patricia Brody's "The Workshop" and Jannett Highfill's "As Long as the Light
Lasts," in the current issue of The Hardy Review (XI:1 [Spring 2009]: 62-3).


 

HARDY

 

Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,

Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,

The crone implacable.  At last he shivered,

Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped

In a world from which there is but one escape

And that forestalled now almost ninety years.

In such a scene as he himself might shape,

The maker of a thousand songs appears.

 

>From this it follows, all the ironies

Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow

The way of things, the suffering one sees,

The many cups of bitterness he must swallow

Before he is permitted to be gone

Where he was headed in that early dawn.  

 

  --Robert Mezey, from Collected Poems 1952-1999 (Fayetteville: University
of Arkansas Press, 2000).

 

 

Bill Morgan

Poetry Editor

The Hardy Review

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/hardy-l/attachments/20090602/2dbab1e9/attachment-0001.html