We focus this time on American poet, Linda Pastan who writes about everyday life as a woman, a mother, a wife. Born in New York City, she lives now in Maryland and has served as the state’s poet laureate. I like this poem, What We Want, especially for the way Pastan writes about the snatches of dreams that we carry all day long. The staccato lists, the aching arms, the way the dream remembers us. It’s as if we are dreaming in the poem. What do you think?
What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names –
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
Linda Pastan