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Journey

By Gerald Stern b. 1925 Gerald Stern

How dumb he was to wipe the blood from his eye

where he was sucker-punched and stagger out

onto the Plaza blind. He had been waiting

all night for the acorn moon and eating pineapple

topping over his ice cream and arguing

either physics or philosophy. He thinks,

at this late date, it was the cave again

throwing a shadow, although it may have been

only some way of reconciling the two

oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow—

if only there was a second moon. He had a

kind of beard and though he could practically lift

the front end of a car and was already

reading Blake, he had never yet tasted honey.

Source: Poetry (March 2010).

Biography

Gerald Stern has been called an “American original,” “a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary,” and, by his friend Stanley Kunitz, “the wilderness in American poetry.” Over dozens of books, and decades of teaching and activism, Stern has emerged as one of America’s most celebrated and irascible poets. “If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance,” Stern told Contemporary Poets, “it would be ‘The One Thing in . . .

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