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Brazil, 1991
Such a sweet dream. I dreamed
I was having a conversation
with the great poets—Manuel
Bandeira and Carlos Drummond
de Andrade. “I was born
tired, hungry, and cold,” I said.
And Drummond answered, “I too.”
Copyright © 1993 by Lloyd Schwartz. This poem originally appeared in Harvard Magazine, March 1993. Used with permission of the author.
1
Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it's not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony
isn't lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it's about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
becauA cross-country, exquisite corpse by thirteen regional poet laureate fellows from our 2021-2022 cohort examining the role of a laureate in community.
Always a shift in definitions:
auteur author into community worker,
not we are here to hear your voice
but are here to give us voice
(we seem to have mislaid it on the way
to society, did you bring a flashlight?)
Call it impropriety — we aim to misbehave.
To remind you all your money is no remedy
for the grave.
A big, hefty guy next to me, an even bigger guy
already squeezed into the window seat. Big, pleasant
fellows. Strangers before this three-hour non-stop
domestic flight. But they’ve been talking away non-stop
since before take-off. Talking business. Talking sports.
China. India (my next-seat neighbor might have been