Poems for Friday: Things that might have been

Photo by Catherine Jamieson

When I was a sophomore in high school, I discovered the poetic fragments of Sappho, white hot shards that summed up lust and yearning so perfectly. I searched for more, only to find that time and Roman literary fashion led to the slow annihilation of the vast majority of her work.

There will only ever be one Sappho; it was heartbreaking to discover that most of her insights were lost, probably forever.

It is a hard lesson: that we can throw everything into something only for it to vanish. People die, and mature human beings accept this. The thought of our works — everything from nations to paintings — crumbling is far more painful. One of the only comparable pains is thinking of what might have been done, if at some point the wind had gone a different direction, or an argument ended a different way.

Yet we do not live in those worlds, but in this one. 

Jorge Luis Borges was a remarkable poet, as well as a brilliant narrative writer. He understood the vicissitudes of time and chance far better than most. Here is his ode to everything lost and never-made in our personal histories.

I think about things that might have been and never were.

The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write.

The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed

As soon as he corrected the Comedy's last verse.

History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross.

History without Helen's face.

Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon.

Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South.

The love we never shared.

The vast empire the Vikings declined to found.

The globe without the wheel, or without the rose.

John Donne's judgment of Shakespeare.

The Unicorn's other horn.

The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once.

The child I never had.

Comments

[Vivacious G]

Nice post, David, though bittersweet and tinged with regret (er, that's what bittersweet is, isn't it?) Anyway, I used to write tons of poems in high school and my English teacher would embarrass me and tell everyone what great a poet I was (and then people would ask me to write them poems for their assignments, haha, how cliched.) No one sees those poems now ... but maybe you have sparked something. I haven't looked at them in years and I'm sad to say I'm not sure where they are.