Sally Murphy is hosting today’s Poetry Friday round-up.
It’s becoming harder and harder to pick up a newspaper or listen to the news. NPR was my go to radio station in the car, but not any more. And I can’t remember the last time I watched a news program on TV. World news, national news, even state and local news seems to have become relentlessly awful, at times even catastrophic. I came across this poem in an anthology I had bought at the Strand back when I could walk to it on my lunch hour. I think it’s one I need to read often in the coming weeks and months…or however long it takes for the people who run this world (and seem bent upon destroying it) to come to their senses.
Thanks, Robert Frost by David Ray
Do you have hope for the future? someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end. Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be, perhaps, what we wished, or what looking back half the time it seems we could so easily have been, or ought… The future, yes, and even for the past, that it will become something we can bear. And I too, and my children, so I hope, will recall as not too heavy the tug of those albatrosses I sadly placed upon their tender necks. Hope for the past, yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage, and it brings strange peace that itself passes into past, easier to bear because you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.