“You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from everything that comes next.”

—Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

There will be time ...

        And indeed there will be time    
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,    
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;            
There will be time, there will be time    
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;    
There will be time to murder and create,    
And time for all the works and days of hands    
That lift and drop a question on your plate;            
Time for you and time for me,    
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,    
And for a hundred visions and revisions,    
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
There will be time, there will be time    
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;    
There will be time to murder and create,    
And time for all the works and days of hands    
That lift and drop a question on your plate;           
Time for you and time for me,    
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,    
And for a hundred visions and revisions,    
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--T.S. Elliott, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock