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A Person Protests to Fate

Jane Hirshfield

1953 –

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.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, includingThe Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was long listed for the National Book Award. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017.

About Jane Hirshfield

Themes

Desire

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

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More by this poet

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Jane Hirshfield

2017

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Jane Hirshfield

2021

Words

Words are loyal.
Whatever they name they take the side of.
As the word courage will afterward grip just as well
the frightened girl soldier who stands on one side of barbed wire,
the frightened boy soldier who stands on the other.
Death’s clay, they look at each other with wide-open eyes.

Jane Hirshfield

2020

Poems

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A Person Protests to Fate

More by this poet

Let Them Not Say

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

Words

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