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Salvation

By Stephen Dunn b. 1939 Stephen Dunn

Finally, I gave up on obeisance,

and refused to welcome

either retribution or the tease

of sunny days. As for the can’t-be-

seen, the sum-of-all-details,

the One—oh, when it came

to salvation I was only sure

I needed to be spared

someone else’s version of it.

The small prayers I devised

had in them the hard sounds

of split and frost.

I wanted them to speak

as if it made sense to speak

to what isn’t there

in the beaconless dark.

I wanted them to startle

by how little they asked.

Source: Poetry (November 2005).

Biography

Poet Stephen Dunn was born in 1939 in New York City. The first of his family to go to college, Dunn attended Hofstra University on a basketball scholarship and later worked in advertising. In an interview with Poets and Writers, Dunn discussed the leap from being an ad-man to poet: “My first job out of college was writing in-house brochures for Nabisco in New York, and I kept getting promoted. I was in danger, literally, of . . .

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