Reaching Towards Relief

I've been wending my way through a book, Tomcat In Love by Tim O'Brien, recommended by Brit Boy. The epigraph is the last sentence of this poem, which I had read before in a class, but hadn't really noted. Now I'm noting. I hope you'll enjoy it - I think it's now one of my top five.

(The other four would be Aristotle by Billy Collins, "You want a social life, with friends" by Kenneth Koch, TS Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, because my mother used to read it to me.)


One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop