Calmly we walk through this April's day, <br />Metropolitan poetry here and there, <br />In the park sit pauper and rentier, <br />The screaming children, the motor-car <br />Fugitive about us, running away, <br />Between the worker and the millionaire <br />Number provides all distances, <br />It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now, <br />Many great dears are taken away, <br />What will become of you and me <br />(This is the school in which we learn...) <br />Besides the photo and the memory? <br />(...that time is the fire in which we burn.) <br /> <br />(This is the school in which we learn...) <br />What is the self amid this blaze? <br />What am I now that I was then <br />Which I shall suffer and act again, <br />The theodicy I wrote in my high school days <br />Restored all life from infancy, <br />The children shouting are bright as they run <br />(This is the school in which they learn . . .) <br />Ravished entirely in their passing play! <br />(...that time is the fire in which they burn.) <br /> <br />Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! <br />Where is my father and Eleanor? <br />Not where are they now, dead seven years, <br />But what they were then? <br /> No more? No more? <br />From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day, <br />Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume <br />Not where they are now (where are they now?) <br />But what they were then, both beautiful; <br /> <br />Each minute bursts in the burning room, <br />The great globe reels in the solar fire, <br />Spinning the trivial and unique away. <br />(How all things flash! How all things flare!) <br />What am I now that I was then? <br />May memory restore again and again <br />The smallest color of the smallest day: <br />Time is the school in which we learn, <br />Time is the fire in which we burn.<br /><br />Delmore Schwartz<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/calmly-we-walk-through-this-april-s-day/
