Lyric from a Dana Gioia Poem

This final stanza in Dana Gioia's poem "The Lost Garden" really spoke to me this morning. What a beautiful lyric.

The trick is making memory a blessing,


 

To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,


Of wanting nothing more than what has been,


To know the past forever lost, yet seeing


Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.

(From his collection Interrogations at Noon, Graywolf Press, 2001.)