Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Poetry Rx: This Gloom is Someone Else’s

    by Sarah Kay Aug 30, 2018 6 minutes

    In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line.

    © Ellis Rosen

    Dear Poets,

    My birthday is coming. It’s not a “big” one—not twenty-one or fifty or a hundred or any other special number—just a regular number in the middle. Honestly, there’s no particular reason I should feel this year is so much more painful than others, but I do. I’m not sure I can describe the feeling—it’s not something to wear purple for, per se. It’s more of a lost feeling: How did I get old? This body is mine and yet surely must also be someone else’s. I want to age gracefully and, most of all, I do not want to become invisible—to myself or anyone else. And I could use some encouragement, a vote of confidence, to know that this is possible. Is there a poem that could help?

    Sincerely,
    Me

    Dear Me,

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review1 min read
    The People’s History of 1998
    France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfo
    The Paris Review19 min read
    The Beautiful Salmon
    I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why. They jump all over the place—out of rivers, up waterfalls. Some say they jump to clean their gills. Others sa
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Life Poem 1
    A leaf falls here/there, now/thenbehind the rain, a curtain of rain,the trees in their own time.I see now that time falls in layers. There were deer there once, in the clearing,three deer, large as memory objects.They stood in a circleas if they knew

    Related