Thinking of Grace
August 31, 2011
Few people ever so embodied joy or so freely shared themselves as the writer Grace Paley, who died at 84 in 2007. She was known for her slim, compelling stories fueled not by plot but by pitch-perfect, tragic-comic New York dialogue. But tonight, thinking of her and her impish eyes and corona of white curls, I turned to one of her later poems:
Therefore
When I am old
I will not be surprised as
Leon Trotsky said I would
I will not be surprised
for I have built my
Ship of Death as D.H. Lawrence
said I should
Therefore I can right now
as Barbara Deming cried
come dance with all your might
then I will live though I die old
in passion like a fool as
William Butler Yeats thought
would be right
Now I have learned in politics and
dream from William Blake
and that beloved Prince Kropotkin
whom I’ve read
with Robert Nichols in
the parlor and in bed
before we loved and sometimes afterwards
because the summer moon stands low
to glare on shadowed fields and in
this window makes such light it is
the natural law as any child
would know of moon and love and night
Here’s a glimpse of Grace from a documentary about her by Lilly Rivlin: