Suddenly everything
Stayed the same.We who had called
The water blueRefocused on our lenses.
We who had seen the island moveReunderstood our oars. The sand
Composed some drumlins in the soundWhile we revised the sky. And whether we felt fog or not,
The sun still burned alive. Arose, along the tidelines,Ever un-updated news. (Some news was not
Of men.) A day and a night were number fiveAnd suddenly nothing changed again.
On the Fourth Day
Heather McHugh
For Richard Hladky
Feature Date
- May 5, 2018
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Copyright © 2018 by Heather McHugh
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Spring 2018
Sewanee, Tennessee
University of the South
Editor
Adam Ross
Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith
Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
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