You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford

You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

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This thing we can do with our attention, to attend to the now, the gift of time to the present, only waiting for us to really look. Whatever the future holds is not yet, what is here is here and it is everything.

You Reading This, Be Ready is from William Stafford's posthumous The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1998), edited by his son Kim Stafford after his death in 1993.