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“Four Quartets” Revisited

By Belle Randall b. 1940 Belle Randall

On opening a long unopened book,

what odor rises from the parting pages,

what genie is released, what dark spell broken,

as if some spirit trapped inside for ages,

By this hinge swung open were set free?

My father’s hand has jotted in the margins

its own blunt text of what must be

lecture notes, and planted his place marker

Like a flag among “The Dry Salvages”—

a UC “schedule card,” a blank

grid for weekly classes, and on the back,

O fees and late fees time alone assuages—

We know the longhand’s labored look

was mine, but why that child should scrawl

a phrase so apt for now’s beyond recall:

on opening a long unopened book.

Source: Poetry (September 2009).

Biography

Born in Ellensburg, Washington, poet Belle Randall earned a BA at the University of California Berkeley, an MA at Stanford University, and a second MA at the University of Washington. Her precise use of form and meter often shapes portraits of both observed life and interior states. She is the author of the poetry collections 101 Different Ways of Playing Solitaire and Other Poems (1973) and The Coast Starlight (2010). She . . .

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