Jane Hirshfield’s books include The Beauty (poems) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, both Knopf 2015. A poet equally of interior life and environmental, justice, and peace concerns, she's received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, NEA, and Academy of American Poets; the Poetry Center Book Award; and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. A current chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Hirshfield’s work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. Her poems open the 2017 anthology Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now and close the Library of America's War No More: Three Centuries of American Anti-War and Peace Writing.
As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us
By Jane HirshfieldAdded: Thursday, April 27, 2017 / Previously published in "Washington Square Review." Used with permission.As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting.
Remain this many Siberian tigers,
that many African elephants. Three hundred red egrets.
We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder
as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast iron pan.
Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.