What We Have Lived

I've been under the weather lately, so last night I took some time off from doing homework to do some pleasure reading. Well, maybe not pleasure reading - I am in a poetry writing class this semester so any reading of poems I can do can be called 'studying' if I need an excuse not to do work for Economics 101.

I decided last night to read through Ellen C. Bush's Licorice again, and after enjoying that, I moved on the the Spring 2007 copy of Tar River Poetry that I hadn't read yet. Here was my favorite poem in the TRP, a villanelle by Bruce Bennett, who is the director of Creative Writing at Wells College.


What We Have Lived

We live again what we have lived before.
The path leads back. See, see. There is the chair.
We feel it deeper, knowing less, and more.

See. There's the book; the album on the floor.
Old papers waiting to be signed are there.
We live again what we have lived before,

Except, this time, we know we won't explore
what hangs unspoken, heavy in the air.
We feel it deeper, knowing less, yet more

About what grief has schooled us to ignore;
our innocence the sole way we can bear
to live again what has been lived before;

To face again what words cannot restore,
last sessions we can neither change nor share.
We feel them deeper. Knowing less, and more,

We pay fresh homage, pilgrims at the door,
held fast by truths we still cannot declare.
We live again what we have lived before,
yet feel it deeper, kn0owing less, and more.



I hope it is okay to put this poem up. It isn't up on the TRP site, and I really wanted to put it on my site. You know a poem in a specific form is a good one when it makes you want to write in the same form. Villanelles might just be my favorite.