“How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?”

A couple of poems have been rattling around in my head in recent months: The Layers by Stanley Kunitz and Li-Young Lee’s From Blossoms.  Both consider youth, aging, and experience, but from different angles. There’s a line in Kunitz’s The Layers: “How shall the heart be reconciled/to its feast of losses?” that I think of often these days.

– Hilary Easton