Life Legacy Poem: "Thanks, Robert Frost"

This morning, when I heard Garrison Keillor read David Ray's poem "Thanks, Robert Frost" on the radio, thoughts of life legacies came to mind ... so it seemed like a good time to share the poem with my blog readers:

Thanks, Robert Frost

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

By David Ray, from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems. © The Backwaters Press. Reprinted with permission by The Writer's Almanac.

Thanks, David Ray, for your poem. And thank you Garrison for your reading this morning. It was a great way to start my day in sunny, yes sunny, many days in a row, sunny Oregon!

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