Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems “The Meadow:”

… Bedeviled,

human, your plight, in waking,

is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue,

and to know that tangled among them and

terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

The journey.

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
t