So you’re you, yes? A person of conservative or traditional or simply unloony views walking your campus with your head in...
The Gift
June 10, 2015
This poem appears in the Summer 2013 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.
I had a gift once that I then refused.
Now, when I take it, though I be accused
Of softness, cant, self-weariness at best,
Of failure, fear, neurosis, and the rest,
Still, I am here and I shall not remove.
I know my need. And this reluctant love,
This little that I have, is something true,
Sign of the unrevealed that lies in you.
Grace is the gift. To take it my concern—
Itself the only possible return.
Helen Pinkerton is a poet and scholar of Herman Melville and of the American Civil War. Her books include Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s and Taken in Faith: Poems. She has taught at Stanford University and elsewhere.
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