The Writer’s Almanac: “Someone I Cared For” by Cid Corman

Someone I cared for
Someone I cared for
put it to me: Who
do you think you are?

I went down the list
of all the manypossibilities
carefully — did it
twice — but couldn't find
a plausible one.

That was when I knew for the first time who
in fact I wasn't.

"Someone I cared for" by Cid Corman, from And The Word. © Coffee House Press, 1987.

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The Writer's Almanac: "The Rider" by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Rider

by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.


"The Rider" by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Fuel. © BOA Editions, 1998.

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The Writer's Almanac: "Self-Knowledge" by C.K. Williams

Self-knowledge
by C. K. Williams

Because he was always the good-hearted one, the ingenuous one, the one

who knew no cunning,

who, if "innocent" didn't quite apply, still merited some similar connota-

tion of naïveté, simplicity,

the sense that an essential awareness of the coarseness of other people's

motives was lacking

so that he was constantly blundering upon situations in which he would

take on good faith

what the other rapaciously, ruthlessly, duplicitously and nearly always

successfully offered as truth. . .

All of that he understood about himself but he was also aware that he

couldn't alter at all

his basic affable faith in the benevolence of everyone's intentions and that

because of this the world

would not as in romance annihilate him but would toy unmercifully with

him until he was mad.

"Self-knowledge" by C.K. Williams, from Flesh and Blood. © Farrar/Straus/Giroux, New York, 1998.

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The Writer's Almanac: Religious Consolation

Religious Consolation
by John Updike

One size fits all. The shape or coloration
of the god or high heaven matters less
than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing
the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite
the widow brings to the temple. A child
alone with horrid verities cries out
for there to be a limit, a warm wall
whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs
those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints
whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,
those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books
Moroni etched in tedious detail?
We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

"Religious Consolation" by John Updike
from Americana and Other Poems.
© Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

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The Writer's Almanac: "Self-Employed" by David Ignatow

I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You're fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I'm letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?

Poem: "Self-Employed" by David Ignatow from Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994. © Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Reprinted with permission.

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