'The Good Life'

“We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.” – Tracy K. Smith

The nation’s 22^nd Poet Laureate, Smith, who was born in 1972, grew up in a house lined with books of all kinds ranging from Sci-Fi paperbacks to Shakespeare’s sonnets.  

              

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her spectacular book of poems Life on Mars, Smith noted,  “When we’re talking about the feelings that poems alert us to and affirm, we’re speaking as our realest selves.”   For Saturday’s Poem, here is Smith’s,

                                         The Good Life

                        When some people talk about money
                        They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
                        Who went out to buy milk and never
                        Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
                        For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
                        Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
                        Like a woman journeying for water
                        From a village without a well, then living
                        One or two nights like everyone else
                        On roast chicken and red wine.

 

 

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