Poetry: 'Everything Happening Around Us'

“I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.” – Rita Dove

Dove, who was born this week in 1952, is both a poet and essayist and the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987.      From 2004-06 she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia after earlier being named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. 

Dove is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Virginia and has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them 25 honorary doctorates (most recently from Yale University).   Her most recent book is Collected Poems 1974-2004 and includes the short poem Exit, today’s choice for Saturday’s Poem.

        Exit

Just when hope withers, the visa is granted.
The door opens to a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats; except it is your street
you are leaving.  A visa has been granted,
'provisionally'-a fretful word.
The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here it's gray. The door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.
Well, the world's open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.

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