Inspired by classical Chinese hermit poets, David Budbill dispatches poems from his remote Vermont hermitage, Judevine Mountain, but cannot escape the complications and struggles of a modern existence. Loneliness, aging, and political outrage are addressed in poems with blunt honesty, humor and keen insight into the human condition.
Weaving throughout While We’ve Still Got Feet is the peace of a wilderness home, the pleasures of daily life, and a perceptive melancholy over the passage of time. As in his previous bestselling volume, Moment to Moment—which was cited by Booklist as a “Top Ten Book of the Year”—Budbill confronts opposites: solitude and loneliness, contentment and restlessness, the allures of the city versus the country, and the tension between engagement with and withdrawal from the world.
Tomorrow
by David Budbill
Tomorrow we are bones and ash, the roots of weeds poking through our skulls.
Today, simple clothes, empty mind, full stomach, alive, aware, right here, right now.
Drunk on music, who needs wine?
Come on, Sweetheart, let’s go dancing while we still have feet.
From the book While We’ve Still Got Feet by David Budbill, published by Copper Canyon Press.
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