A Person Protests to Fate by Jane Hirshfield

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 24, 2015   A Person Protests to Fate   Jane Hirshfield

A person protests to fate:   “The things you have caused me most to want are those that furthest elude me.”   Fate nods. Fate is sympathetic.   To tie the shoes, button a shirt, are triumphs for only the very young, the very old.   During the long middle:   conjugating a rivet mastering tango training the cat to stay off the table preserving a single moment longer than this one continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before   and the penmanships love practices inside the body.            Copyright © 2015 by Jane Hirshfield. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Much that once seemed impossibly difficult is later taken for granted; then, in age, it becomes again hard. For most of a life, the fingers only feel unmanageable if, say, at forty or fifty you decide to learn guitar or piano.   The unreachable is the magnet of desire. We long to long. Some things, though, are outside all this. No matter our own will or wish, they reach for us—a great love; the unwriteable poem; all that becomes our own soon-enough-to-be-finished fates.” —Jane Hirshfield   Jane Hirshfield is the author of two new books, The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area.   Photo Credit: Michael Lionheart Most Recent Book by Hirshfield   The Beauty (Knopf, 2015) "If There Is Something to Desire, 9, 17, 18" by Vera Pavlova "Driven by a Strange Desire" by Mónica de la Torre "Manifest Destiny" by Cynthia Lowen Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038