Educación Poética #3

The Prediction

Mark Strand

That night the moon drifted over the pond,
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees
a young woman walked, and for an instant

the future came to her:

rain falling on her husband’s grave, rain falling

on the lawns of her children, her own mouth

filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house

a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,

a woman strolling under its trees, thinking of death,

thinking of him thinking of her, and the wind risiing

and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark.

(1937)