Jameson Fitzpatrick - "The Tribute"

I was thinking of a daughter, there
in the crush of a summer
what can save her from. You know the one:

that thick season from which she’ll feel everything
that follows, follows. She isn’t wrong

to get in the car with the older boy;
in a sense she must,
because she wants to. Headlong dive into the backseat.

Headstrong is the word

her father uses before disappearing
back to his office. For him, the one suffices.

Not me: voluble as our girl, as I ever was

though I have made a study of restraint,
and practiced plenty,
posed at the closed piano when no one’s home.

Some nights when she’s returned to me, I for a second
think: Changeling!

Of course it’s her; it’s only that
as her resemblance to me—to a version
I can remember and recognize as self—grows

it gets harder to see her
grow, at once, ever more distinct from me.
Further and clearer.

Even as she repeats my errors:
the selection of boy, my old white jacket with the fringe.
And wears her seatbelt

always, because her mother made her.

It’s not for her I wait up.
In fact, she never comes.

Still someone has to fill the loud freedom
that someone who must have been me
must have chosen.

Ellery Akers - "My Sister Blazed Through Her Life"

When she was young, she had a small part in a play, but everyone looked at her. Dull her down, the director said, throw an old coat over her. They did, but everyone still looked at her.

When a man on the street whistled and said, Oh, baby, she stopped and gave a speech: This man is impugning my dignity as a woman. A crowd gathered, and the whistler slunk away.

Once, racing to an audition, she got held up at gunpoint, but she said, I’m sorry, I don’t have time to be mugged, and the man lowered his gun and laughed and let her go.

- Ellery Akers, first published in The Sun

From Martin Buber's "I and Thou"

“Man receives, and what he receives is not a ‘content’ but a presence, a presence as strength…Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. The question about the meaning of life has vanished. But if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your senses. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of ‘another life’ but that of this our life, not that of a ‘beyond’ but of this our world, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this world. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us.”

From T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter…”

- T.S. Eliot, from “The Burial of the Dead” section of The Waste Land.
Full poem here.

W.H. Auden, from "Poem #4"

“…But happy now, though no nearer each other,
We see the farms lighted all along the valley;
Down at the mill-shed the hammering stops
And men go home.

Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now
For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.”

- W.H. Auden, from “Poem #4”

The Elder's Speech to Alyosha, from "The Brothers Karamazov"

"...What is wrong? For the present you do not belong here. I give you my blessing for your great task of obedience in the world at large. You have much traveling yet to do. And you will have to get married, you will have to. You will have to endure everything before you return again. And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.”