To Beat the Child Was Bad Enough, Maya Angelou

A young body, light

As winter sunshine, a new

Seed's bursting promise,

Hung from a string of silence

Above its future.

(The chance of choice was never known.)

Hunger, new hands, strange voices,

its cry came natural, tearing.

Water boiled in innocence, gaily

In a cheap pot.

The child exchanged its

curiosity for terror. The skin

Withdrew, the flesh submitted.

Now, cries make shards

of broken air, beyond an unremembered

Hunger and the peace of strange hands.

A young body floats.

Silently.

some soul reading

from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, one long prose letter from a devout father to his son, near the end of his life, haven't wanted the book to end

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone . . .

No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.