Poetry Explorer


Classic and Contemporary Poetry


MOVING by JAMES HARRISON

Poet Analysis

First Line: NOT THOSE WHO HAVE LIVED HERE AND GONE
Last Line: OF ALL THAT HAPPENED THERE.
Subject(s): LONGING; MEMORY; MOVING & MOVERS; PROPERTY; SOLITUDE; POSSESSIONS; LONELINESS;

Not those who have lived here and gone
but what they have left: a worn-out broom,
coat hangers, the legs of a doll,
errors of possession to remind us of ourselves;
but for drunkenness or prayers the walls
collapse in boredom, or any new ecstasy
could hold them up, any moan or caress
or pillow-muffled laugh;
leaving behind as a gift seven rooms of air
once thought cathedral, those imagined
beasts at windows,
her griefs hung from the ceiling for spectacle.

But finally here I am often there
in its vacant shabbiness,
standing back to a window in the dark,
carried by the house as history, a boat,
deeper into a year, into the shadow
of all that happened there.



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