[i want to go back] by Gregory Orr
[i want to go back]
by Gregory Orr
I want to go back
To the beginning.
We all do.
I think:
Hurt won’t be there.
But I’m wrong.
Where the water
Bubbles up
At the spring:
Isn’t that a wound?
This is one of the great grief poems, and the opening of grief to life. Gregory Orr is one of the masters of short lyric in contemporary American poetry, and germane to his writing, at age twelve, in a hunting accident, Orr accidentally killed his younger brother. He knows something about grief and healing. This poem, arriving at the recognition that the wound is the spring, that what flows from it is what he has made of his life, and that the desire for unwounded origin at the heart of all aches is so deeply human and yet the wound itself is source.
