OK Let’s Go
Let’s go to Dawn School
and learn again to begin
oh something different
from repetition
Let’s go to the morning
and watch the sun smudge
every bankrupt idea
of nature “you can’t write about
anymore” said my friend
the photographer “except
as science”
Let’s enroll ourselves
in the school of the sky
where knowing
how to know
and unknow is everything
we’ll come to know
under what they once thought
was the dome of the world
Copyright © 2016 by Maureen N. McLane. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 5, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A lot of sunrises, conversations with friends, books, and romantic poets probably lie behind this poem, which chimes with something Beckett wrote: ‘The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.’ Also here, and throughout the book, this poem comes from: a desire to resist apocalyptic anxiety without denying ‘reality.’”
—Maureen N. McLane
Maureen N. McLane
Maureen N. McLane studied at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Chicago, where she received a PhD in English in 1997.