Alone

Galway Kinnell

This poem was sent by the Writer's Almanac on Christmas Day. 

I first discovered Galway Kinnell's work in 1987 when I came to Ohio for the MFA program in fiction writing.  I found a copy of his Book of Nightmares in the campus bookstore.  His work was unlike any other poetry I had read, and I find that book still haunts my mind.  The poems have strong, archetypal images throughout.

I like the following poem and think it an exceptional choice for Christmas Day, as holidays are about communion with the sacred aspect of ourselves and we have a deeply engrained need to share this experience with others. 

This poem causes me to think deeply about what aloneness feels like, and the longing that accompanies it.

There is a boundary line between solitude and loneliness--sometimes it's hard to understand which side of the line we are on.  This boundary is a theme I return to again and again in my own work.

Poem: "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" by Galway Kinnell, from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.