Return to putting up with it
Inside Boston’s famed Symphony Hall during a concert
“Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Count will die, that you will accept
your America back to live like a prim thing
on the farm in Maine.
I tell you, you will come
here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose
world go drunk each night, to see the handsome
children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close
one Friday at Symphony.’’
— From “Some Foreign Letters,’’ by Anne Sexton (1928-1974), Pulitzer Prize-winning Massachusetts poet
Under a guttering sun
Old Harbor Life Saving Station, in the Cape Cod National Seashore
“We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.’’
— From “The Truth the Dead Know,’’ by Anne Sexton (1928-74)