The Happiest Day
Linda Pastan
It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn’t believe. Our children were asleep
or playing, the youngest as new
as the new smell of the lilacs,
and how could I have guessed
their roots were shallow
and would be easily transplanted.
I didn’t even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.
So we sat on the porch
in the cool morning, sipping
hot coffee. Behind the news of the day —
strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere —
I could see the top of your dark head
and thought not of public conflagrations
but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder.
If someone could stop the camera then …
if someone could only stop the camera
and ask me: are you happy?
perhaps I would have noticed
how the morning shone in the reflected
color of lilac. Yes, I might have said
and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

I don’t handle the “small irritations” well. I get bogged down and overwhelmed easily; I’ve been there lately, in fact. But the camera stopped for me a few nights ago when I read this poem in “Good Poems for Hard Times.”

Here’s what I know but don’t believe: These days when the kids are “new as the new smell of the lilacs” are slipping by me. So I hope I remember this poem the next time I get caught up in the minutiae — tomorrow, when I’m trying to pour a cup of milk and fold the laundry and change the diapers, or next week, when all the bills are due and the fuel gauge is on E again and I don’t know what to make for dinner. I hope I’ll be able to shout out “salt on melon! salt on melon!” and rise above the irritations. I want to recognize that I’m happy now, not in retrospect, not when things have been transplanted and torn down.

Now.

I’m happy now.

Aunt Judy’s going home tomorrow. The hospice stuff should be set up and ready by the time she gets home. We’re sitting here in the hospital waiting room, I’m checking my email, and there’s the latest American Life in Poetry column. The poem’s title? “Hospital.”

American Life in Poetry
By Ted Kooser
U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places–both familiar and
foreign–looked, how they seemed. Here Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her poem in
this way, too, in a space familiar to us all but made new–made strange–by close
observation.

Hospital

It seems so–
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk–
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop–ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be–
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.

American Life in Poetry: Column 122

By Ted Kooser
U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
There is a type of poem, the Found Poem, that records an author’s discovery of the beauty that occasionally occurs in the everyday discourse of others. Such a poem might be words scrawled on a wadded scrap of paper, or buried in the classified ads, or on a billboard by the road. The poet makes it his or her poem by holding it up for us to look at. Here the Washington, D.C., poet Joshua Weiner directs us to the poetry in a letter written not by him but to him.

Found Letter
What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this:
Gifts freely given, that you never earned;
Open affection with your wife and kids;
Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit;
Few days in court, with little consequence;
A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours
In the office; close friends who speak the truth;
Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich
Enough to build the future with; a bed
In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love;
A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep,
And sleep to trim the long night coming;
Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be
None other; freedom to forget the time;
To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined
Yet does not seek the terms of its release,
Like a child’s kite catching at the wind
That flies because the hand holds tight the line.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Joshua Weiner. Reprinted from “From the Book of Giants,” University of Chicago Press, 2006, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.