Yesterday's "Poem of the Day" from The American Academy of Poets
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| Nick Flynn |
Nick Flynn, 1960
Years later I’m standing before a roomful of young writers in a
high school in Texas. I’ve asked them to locate an image in a
poem we’d just read—their heads at this moment are bowed to
the page. After some back & forth about the grass & a styrofoam
cup, a girl raises her hand & asks, Does it matter? I smile—it is as
if the universe balanced on those three words & we’ve landed in
the unanswerable. I have to admit that no, it doesn’t, not really,
matter, if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in
our heads. But, I whisper, leaning in close, to get through the
next forty-seven minutes we might have to pretend it does.
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