Today's Poem of the Week comes from Pulitzer Prize-winning and former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. "An Old Story" is featured in Smith's most recent collection, Wade in the Water, which was preceded by three other books of poetry and an acclaimed memoir, Ordinary Light. Smith's poetry is a uniquely fascinating blend of the ethereal, a kind of science fiction at times, with the intellectual, with a forceful questioning of power and identity, with the resonance of image and language. I find her poems both hard to pin down and impossible to ignore. If Smith is saying and doing more with her poetry that we can each entirely pinpoint on our own, surely her work's lyrical endurance in the mind is enough to cement its value. Therefore, I bring "An Old Story" to the blog because in the years since I first read it, it has continued to sing in my head, to remind me of such color.
An Old Story
We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful
Dream. The worst in us having taken over
And broken the rest utterly down.
A long age
Passed. When at last we knew how little
Would survive us—how little we had mended
Or built that was not now lost—something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather.
Then animals long believed gone crept down
From trees. We took new stock of one another.
We wept to be reminded of such color.
- Tracy K. Smith
From Wade in the Water