
Intro by Ted Kooser
Jane Hirshfield, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, is one of our country’s finest poets, and I have never seen a poem of hers that I didn’t admire. Here’s a fine one that I see as being about our inability to control the world beyond us.
By Jane Hirshfield
Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.
Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.
Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
DISCLAIMER:
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Jane Hirshfield, "The Promise " from Come, Thief. Copyright © 2011 by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved. Introduction copyright © 2023 by The Poetry Foundation.
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