Building a bookshelf
“Duncan” by Thom Gunn
Honestly, I needed a picture last night, and I wanted it to be colorful. I kept waiting for the right thing to catch my eye but I could not find it. I’m trying to avoid doing to many nature/flower shots because there is so much more to life (although nature is super valuable, don’t get me wrong.) When I realized that I didn’t always need to find the beauty, the poetry, outside. Sometimes the beauty is something that I put together with my own hands at midnight with a good friend, and then spent an hour languishing over the order of each of my very few books.
The past few days have been filled with stress as I am about to start the last two semesters of my undergrad. Questions about what I want to do in the future, why I want to do it, and how to make it reality, overwhelm me.
The speakers urgency, the tirelessness of his twenties and the drive for life in the first section of this poem helped me feel better after a long day struggling with the future. I am young, and there is so much left to do. I feel, like the speaker, that I must keep learning “You add to, you don’t cancel what you do.”
Life will eventually fail, we may fall down the stairs or drift to sleep and never wake. It doesn’t take away from the urgency of the now, but confirms that perhaps a winding path is not one that should be dreaded. I may not know right now exactly what I want to do, but I have the skills to explore those questions.
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Read the full poem here:
