Funny Strange

By Jennifer Michael Hecht

We are tender and our lives are sweet

And they are already over and we are
visiting them in some kind of endless
reprieve from oblivion, we are walking
around in them and after we shatter
with love for everything we settle in.

Thou tiger on television chowing,
thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical
roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom
of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation.

Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean's
harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce
a vineyard of grapes from one's apron
and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up
bread and offer up one's armful to the throng?

Let us live as if we were still among
the living, let our days be patterned after
theirs.

Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

(This poem originally appeared in the October 2003 issue of Poetry magazine. And read an older BIO at
poetryfoundation.org/bio/jennifer-michael-hecht . You may want to go to the post
just below to see what historical (yet up-to-the-moment) challenge Jennifer Michael Hecht is writing today...)