This holiday week, the Dish is re-publishing some of our favorite poems that we've run in the last year, selected by our poetry and literary editors, Alice and Matt. They'll be titled "A Poem From The Year" and will include a link to support Alice's work at the Poetry Society of America.
"The Hospital" by Patrick Kavanagh:
A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins—an art lover’s woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.
This week the Dish is rerunning some of our favorite poems we posted this year; this poem is the first in the series. If you enjoy the poetry on the Dish, please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.
(Reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of Katherine B. Kavanagh and the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency)
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