Sharing some favorite lines
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.” We can’t change the past; we need to learn how to make peace with it, to move on ourselves.
My father, a scientist, loved poetry. He introduced me to many of his favorites, and they quickly became my favorites. Emily Dickinson, who has been with me through every stage of my life. Langston Hughes, who reminds me to hold on to laughter. And William Butler Yeats – I firmly believe that you can find the keys to life in Yeats.
But my father loved Omar Khayyam especially. Something about a Persian astronomer and poet who lived nearly a millennium ago always spoke to him. There was one passage, from the Rubaiyat, that he’d always quote to me:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Rubaiyat
A few nights ago, when I couldn’t sleep, I stayed up reading the Rubaiyat, thinking of my father. As always, reading these lines brought back memories of his voice. The past is indelible, he’d tell me, it’s something that you carry with you. Once the line is written, you can’t unwrite it.
Khayyam’s words connect me back through the generations. I take pleasure in the verses that my father liked, and he took pleasure in those that had passed down to him over a thousand years. This poem is the connective tissue from me, to him, to all the centuries of poetry-lovers before us.
And while this poem reminds me of that lineage, and the ways we look backward, it also challenges me to look forward. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.” We can’t change the past; we need to learn how to make peace with it, to move on ourselves.
This spring, that is my wish for all of us – that the prospect of a post-pandemic world begins to thaw the challenges that enveloped us for the past year. Already, the flowers in my garden are blooming, reminding me of Claude McKay’s lyrical evocation, “Too green the springing April grass.” Vaccination rates continue to rise. The occasional burst of rain makes the city, as E.E. Cummings says, “puddle-wonderful.” And the Smithsonian is busy planning its own renewal of reopening as we eagerly anticipate welcoming visitors in person again. As Walt Whitman does, in Song of the Open Road, we celebrate the new beginning: “Health and free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”
Related posts:
Posted: 26 April 2021
- Categories:
