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My Name -- Mark Strand

Guest poem submitted by Masha Saakova:
(Poem #1831) My Name
 One night when the lawn was a golden green
 and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
 in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
 with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass
 feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
 what I would become -- and where I would find myself --
 and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
 that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
 my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
 one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
 as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
 from which it had come and to which it would go.
-- Mark Strand
You already have three Mark Strand poems up, but this one is, by far, my
favorite. I saw it last year in The New Yorker.  I don't want to dissect
this poem too much because I have read it over and over again simply for the
experience. It also seems that Strand poems do not necessarily have a
singular or definite meaning, and that's really part of their beauty. "My
Name" needs to be read aloud -- the sounds are musical (he does a lot of
near-rhymes, consonsance, assonance, alliteration.) I love the stillness
and, yet, the suspense and darkness of the night. The numerous details
convey his awareness of self and of the nature, the surroundings, the world
of which he is a part and still separated from.  To me (emphasis on me,)
this poem is about enjoying a moment and the world that is all ours to take
in, but it is also about realizing our insignificant role in it. I've read
this poem at least a dozen times, and each time I make a discovery -- I
think that's what Strand intended. Hope you like it.

Thanks for your time,
Masha

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