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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Ryan
Michael Ryan
Born in 1946, the poet Michael Ryan's works have been selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about the Past
Book Loaned to Tom Andrews
by Bobby C. Rogers
Evasive Action
by Charlie Smith
Imperatives
by Marilyn Buck
Last Century
by Wyatt Prunty
On Becoming a Poet in the 1950s
by Stephen Beal
The Ark Upon His Shoulders
by Forrest Gander
The Cold War [excerpt]
by Kathleen Ossip
The Hammock
by Li-Young Lee
The Present Crisis
by James Russell Lowell
When I Am in the Kitchen
by Jeanne Marie Beaumont
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The Past

 
by Michael Ryan

It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,
storms through the house confiscating,
says it must be paid and quickly,
says it must take everything.

Your children stare into their cornflakes,
your wife whispers only once to stop it,
because she loves you and she sees it
darken the room suddenly like a stain.

What did you do to deserve it,
ruining breakfast on a balmy day?
Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.
There was no life without it anyway.






From New and Selected Poems by Michael Ryan. Copyright © 2004 by Michael Ryan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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