A True account of talking to the sun at Fire Island

Frank O'Hara

Today’s poem is another Frank O’Hara poem (I’ve shared Frank O’Hara’s "Why I am not a painter” before). This breezy, witty conversation, filled with the lightness of reverie and the expansiveness of a poet who has found meaning in poetry, navigates the complexities of fame, creative energy, criticism and a relationship with nature. Nature’s bounty, O’Hara implies in this poem, is boundless, imperfect, yet relentless. This is what keeps the artist going, the idea that somebody, somewhere might find their work beautiful. This poem has a big heart, and a sense of freedom that feels like the warmth of a mentor’s palm on my shoulder.

"I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!"

~ Frank O'Hara