RESPITE IN A MINOR KEY

By Marilyn Hacker


I would like an unending stretch of drizzly
weekday afternoons, in a moulting season:
nowhere else to go but across the street for
bread, and the paper.

Later, faces, voices across a table,
or an autumn fricassee, cèpes and shallots,
sipping Gigondas as I dice and hum to
Charpentier’s vespers.

No one’s waiting for me across an ocean.
What I can’t understand or change is distant.
War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined
nightmare. But waking

it will be there still, and one morning closer
to my implication in what I never
chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down
civilian ashes.



(from Desesperanto)