Mark Strand / The Dreadful Has Already Happened

“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”

BY MARK STRAND
BIOGRAPHY

The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.   

They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel   

them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.   

Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.

A small band is playing old fashioned marches.   

My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.   

My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving   

to somebody else. There are palm trees.

The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall   

billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”   

I hear somebody say, “Go on.”

I keep wondering if it will rain.

The sky darkens. There is thunder.   

“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,   

“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.   

The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh   

when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them   

out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.   

It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips

are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered   

around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search   

I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

Mark Strand, “ ‘The Dreadful Has Already Happened’ ” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)