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The Parade

By Billy Collins b. 1941 Billy Collins

How exhilarating it was to march

along the great boulevards

in the sunflash of trumpets

and under all the waving flags—

the flag of ambition, the flag of love.

So many of us streaming along—

all of humanity, really—

moving in perfect step,

yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

How stimulating the scenery of the world,

the rows of roadside trees,

the huge curtain of the sky.

How endless it seemed until we veered

off the broad turnpike

into a pasture of high grass,

headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.

Generation after generation,

we keep shouldering forward

until we step off the lip into space.

And I should not have to remind you

that little time is given here

to rest on a wayside bench,

to stop and bend to the wildflowers,

or to study a bird on a branch—

not when the young

are always shoving from behind,

not when the old keep tugging us forward,

pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

Source: Poetry (August 2001).

Biography

Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. John Updike praised Collins for writing “lovely poems...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all . . .

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