Midpoint and Other Poems by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-96192-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

April–August 1968

Poems

FIREWORKS

These spasms and chrysanthemums of light

are like emotions

exploding under a curved night that corresponds

to the dark firmament within.

See, now, the libidinous flare,

spinning on its stick in vain resistance

to the upright ego and mortality’s gravity;

behold, above, the sudden bloom,

turquoise, each tip a comet,

of pride—followed, after an empty bang,

by an ebbing amber galaxy, despair.

We feel our secrets bodied forth like flags

as wide as half the sky. Now

passions, polychrome and coruscating, crowd

one upon the other in a final fit,

a terminal display

that tilts the children’s faces back in bleached dismay

and sparks an infant’s crying in the grass.

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