May you find true love today—or, better yet, its truest expression, in a great poem. Here’s one to keep forever by the novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje.
Nights when I drove
from dark rural highways into a city wild with light I remember you in a rented car in blackness, a loose map on your knees both of us tense with sudden geography
Or in an airport bus after days of solitude as if returning to this planet from another with time pushed back into our bodies only our eyes holding on to each other with the danger of our love
More on Michael Ondaatje and our Knopf Poetry Newsletter:
More of Michael Ondaatje’s new work will be featured this April, when we send daily poems throughout the month in celebration of National Poetry Month. Please pass along this link to share the Knopf Poetry newsletter with friends in anticipation of our poem-a-day selections, coming to your inbox starting on April 1.
Hear Michael Ondaatje in conversation with Sonali Deraniyagala in Brooklyn, on Tuesday, April 2 at 7:30 pm, hosted by Greenlight Bookstore at St. Joseph’s University. You can register here.
Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf Poetry newsletter series.