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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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| Jane Hirshfield |
Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. After receiving her B.A. from Princeton University in their first graduating class to include women, she went on to study...
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| Waking the Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep
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by Jane Hirshfield |
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But with the sentence:
"Use your failures for paper."
Meaning, I understood,
the backs of failed poems, but also my life.
Whose far side I begin now to enter—
A book imprinted without seeming season,
each blank day bearing on its reverse, in random order,
the mad-set type of another.
December 12, 1960. April 4, 1981. 13th of August, 1974—
Certain words bleed through to the unwritten pages.
To call this memory offers no solace.
"Even in sleep, the heavy millstones turning."
I do not know where the words come from,
what the millstones,
where the turning may lead.
I, a woman forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples,
putting pages of ruined paper
into a basket, pulling them out again.
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From Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield. Reprinted by permission of the author. |
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