To Hold
So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.
One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.
Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.
This poem is excerpted from The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal (Storey Publishing, 2023), edited by James Crews, a collection of highly accessible, uplifting poetry celebrating the small wonders and peaceful moments of everyday life.
This is the fifth of five poems from the anthology reprinted in Terrain.org over the second week of October 2023. As an introduction to the poems, read James Crews’s “The Wonder of Small Things”.
“To Hold” by Li-Young Lee, from Behind My Eyes. Copyright © 2008 by Li-Young Lee. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia, in 1957 to Chinese political exiles. He is the author of The Undressing; Behind My Eyes; Book of My Nights, which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You, which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose, which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award.
Header photo by Antoha713, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Li-Young Lee courtesy Academy of American Poets.
