Thanks, Robert Frost by David Ray
Thanks, Robert Frost
by David Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
While David Ray wrote it as a poem of an old man writing to a dead older man, testing whether the wisdom received decades earlier still holds — and finding that it does — I found it much earlier in my life and it’s helped me come to terms with regret, honoring the accumulation of experiences alongside the humility that most of us, every day, are just doing the best we can with what we have. Often, that’s a limited viewpoint rife with ambiguity, amidst circumstances that leave us not as well equipped to operate at our best every day as much as we’d like. Thank you, David Ray, for stretching generationally back to surface this very contemporary wisdom.
