When the little girl was told that the sun someday,
In a billion years or a trillion, will burn out dead,
She sobbed in a fierce and ancient way,
And stamped, and shook her head
Till the brown curls flew; and I wondered how,
Given the world, given her place and time,
She should ever come in her own right mind to know
That it all may happen one day before her prime,
The lights go out in one crude burst
Or slowly, blinking across the cold,
The last and worst
The genii or the fisherman had foretold;
And I wondered also how she should ever find
That town whose monuments
Are the rusty barbed wire rattling in the wind
And the torn tents
Amidst whose shredding the bodies crawl
Forever and ever, the broken dead
Who arise again, and again and always fall
For a word that someone said;
Or how she should seek the plundered isles
Adrift on the smoking seas,
Or the desert bloodied for miles and miles,
Or the privacies
Of the Jews laid out in a snowy woods,
The black men laid in the swamp,
All in their hundred attitudes
Of grave desire; or how when the wind is damp
She should come someday to a marble square
Where papers blow and her father stands
In idle discourse with a millionaire
Who will rape her later on with his own hands;
And I wondered finally how all this
Will be anything to secure
What she knows now in her child’s instinct is
The sole world, immensely precious and impure.
My dear, will you learn the saving way?
And then can we go,
In keen joy like Lear and like Cordelia gay,
To invent our lives from these rich hours of woe?
The Saving Way
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