As someone who often wakes up in the night, abruptly unable to sleep, today’s poem from The Writer's Almanac hits home in the uncomfortable way poetry that should startle and unsettle:
Things
by Fleur Adcock, from Selected Poems © Oxford University Press, 1986.
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.
