On the benefits of forgetting

I've just been trawling back through my archives to find Christmas poems.

It's become a bit of a tradition for me to incude an A4 sheet of poems in all my Christmas cards (even the people I don't think will read them).

It's my attempt at spreading the virus of poetry-loving. It isn't very infectious, but once you've caught this wonderful bug you have it for life. I hope you're already infected.

Whilst I was looking I came across this poem by Franz Wright. It's rather marvellous and resonates with me very much, but I'd completely forgotten it.

I am prone to complete forgetting - I can watch a film I've seen several years before and remember NOTHING of it. Really.

However, I did feel a bit like a goldfish swimming around a corner in his bowl and finding a nice plastic cave. Ah, that's a nice plastic cave! Ah, that's a nice plastic cave!

*

Publication Date

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kind-hearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Frederico Garcia Lorca
risen from the dead–
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.

Franz Wright