After Great Pain

continued

This poetry offers no easy cure, either in its making or in the reading. An older and wiser man once told me that if poetry cannot cure, it almost certainly provides consolation. Near the end of Elegy, almost a year after the death of her child, Mary Jo Bang writes:

And now in spite of sorrow unending, the sky is more

Beautiful than it’s ever been.

Blue and night-blue above a string of pale April yellow

Which stands in for incandescent clarity,

Which is heard as if only.