Di Mackey's Blog: You, Reader by Billy Collins

Author: Shashikiran
Posted: Jan 31, 2010

You, Reader by Billy Collins

Sometimes, after reading something particularly disturbing, like the well-known journalist who claims his modest mission is the attempt to prevent citizens in his country from saying later, ‘we didn’t know’, sometimes I feel incredibly raw and frustrated and I slip over to Nina’s blog searching for something beautiful ...

On this visit, I found a poem.

You, Reader
I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you.

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen—it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning—
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside—

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were still strangers to one another

like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time—

me at this table with a bowl of pears,
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.
- Billy Collins, from his collection The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems