The Pond at Dusk
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
Notes
After the relentless hospital machinery of Donald Hall's The Ship Pounding, Jane Kenyon's The Pond at Dusk offers a different kind of stillness. The poem turns our attention toward a quiet landscape at the close of day, where the changing light and the presence of the natural world invite us to observe rather than intervene. There is something deeply comforting about a world that continues its ordinary rhythms beyond our private anxieties. Perhaps solitude becomes bearable when we stop demanding that the world reflect our emotions. Nature carries on without explanation, and its indifference can sometimes feel strangely generous. We are allowed to exist within it without having to resolve everything that troubles us. October's Decay finds a gentler expression in this fading landscape. Evening arrives, the light diminishes, and another day quietly disappears. Yet there is no need to resist every ending. Sometimes the passing of things asks only that we remain present long enough to witness them. #JaneKenyon #AmericanPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #NaturePoetry #Impermanence
Jane Kenyon, “The Pond at Dusk” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon.