“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”

By Mark Strand b. 1934 Mark Strand

The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.

They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel

them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.

Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.

A small band is playing old fashioned marches.

My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.

My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving

to somebody else. There are palm trees.

The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall

billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”

I hear somebody say, “Go on.”

I keep wondering if it will rain.

The sky darkens. There is thunder.

“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,

“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.

The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh

when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them

out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.

It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips

are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered

around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search

I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Biography

Mark Strand is recognized as one of the premier contemporary American poets as well as an accomplished editor, translator and prose writer. The hallmarks of his style are precise language, surreal imagery, and the recurring theme of absence and negation; later collections investigate ideas of the self with pointed, often urbane wit. Named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990, Strand’s career has spanned nearly four decades, and he has . . .

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