Poem a day #3

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

I challenge anyone to read this and not be moved. You don’t even have to know the backstory — that Carver was dying when he wrote it, that he’d spent the last years of his life in a happy relationship after decades of alcoholism and discontent— to appreciate its poignancy.

It’s perfect because it’s spare. Like the petals on Ezra Pound’s ‘wet black bough’* Carver offers the essence of a feeling, rendered with such precision it makes me catch my breath. He captures in those brief words the best we each can hope for in life: that when it ends, whatever we’ve had, it will have been enough.

*(from the 1913 poem 'In a Station on the Metro’)