#the asking

[mournfulroses]

Jane Hirshfield, from a poem titled "Standing Deer," featured in The Asking: New and Selected Poems

[aaknopf]

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Counting, 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. Can make black-­ eyed peas and collards. Can make, from last year’s late-­ ripening persimmons, a pudding. Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— don’t despair of this falling world, not yet didn’t it give you the asking

[home-ward]

“Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.” —Jane Hirshfield

@hmurraywriting

🇺🇸 this is some of the best poetry I’ve ever read. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t heard of Jane Hirshfield until now. I was truly struck by the beauty of many poems in this collection. I rarely urge people to read things, but if you enjoy poetry at all, please pick The Asking. I’m considering buying myself a copy since I got this from the library. Feel free to sign up for my newsletter Homeward as well (also full of literature + lifestyle things)! ❣️

[mournfulroses]

Jane Hirshfield, from a poem titled "The World Loved By Moonight," featured in The Asking: New and Selected Poems

[aaknopf]

[aaknopf]

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The Asking: New and Selected Poems covers half a century's poetry-making by Jane Hirshfield, who shapes whole worlds of feeling—and moves between idea and image—with startling economy.

To Drink

I want to gather your darkness in my hands, to cup it like water and drink. I want this in the same way as I want to touch your cheek— it is the same— the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass; the way a horse will lower its long head to water, and drink, and pause to lift its head and look, and drink again, taking everything in with the water, everything.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Asking by Jane Hirshfield.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield and follow her @janehirshfield on Facebook.

Click here to see a recording of Jane Hirshfield deliver this year's annual Blaney Lecture for the Academy of American Poets, "Making the Invisible Visible." [link will be available after March 19]. Jane will give the keynote speech at The Sierra Poetry Festival in Nevada City, CA on April 13 and will hold a conversation on climate change at the Tiburon Public Library with Science Friday host Ira Flatow in Tiburon, CA on April 19 at 6:30 PM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

from Jane Hirshfield’s The Asking :: [Peege]

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"Briefly, briefly, we see it, and forget. As if the spell were too powerful to hold on the tongue, as if we preferred the weight to the prize --"