This week’s poem, “The Promise,” is a meditation on the ephemeral quality of cut flowers, a spider, a leaf, our physical bodies, the surface of the earth–and how the fleeting nature of all of these things that we try to cling to compares to the constancy of love.
I’ve included the first and last stanzas here. The full poem may be read by clicking the link above to the Poetry Foundation, where it’s been reprinted with permission.
Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower…Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,Always.
Writer Jane Hirshfield is a prolific poet and translator. In addition to many volumes of poetry, she has also published two collections about the craft of writing. I highly recommend both of these–Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015).
“The Promise” is from Hirshfield’s collection, Come, Thief (2011).
The featured image is a photograph I took of a vase of anemones, one of many anemone bouquets we’ve enjoyed from our local farmers market this spring, and one of many that inspired Doug’s drawing above. Always.
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