Lawrence Raab
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Assignment
Write about what you can see
and what you can’t––
the fountain in the rain, the day
nothing happened, all the days
almost nothing happened.
Write about what’s going on
somewhere else at this moment—
why you’re glad you’re not there,
or how much you wish you were.
You can go anywhere if you don’t
have a plan—owl in the attic, clock
on the wall, how quiet
it’s become. The end will arrive
when you’re ready.
You can sense it even now
in the white sky of this page,
in that heaven
you don’t have to believe to include.
Lawrence Raab is the author of ten books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times, and What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993), a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. His latest collection is April at the Ruins (Tupelo, 2022). Why Don’t We Say What We Mean?, essays about poetry, appeared in 2016. He is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Emeritus at Williams College.