When You Have Lived a Long Time Alone

South Bend on Purpose is a podcast about place, belonging, and South Bend hosted by Jacob Titus, Dustin Mix, and John Garry.

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This week on South Bend on Purpose, we are reading a selection from Galway Kinnell’s poem “When You Have Lived a Long Time Alone” and reflecting on what it might be saying about our life together in South Bend.

WHEN YOU HAVE LIVED A LONG TIME ALONE

When you have lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters 
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, you see
they all live to mate with their kind, and you know,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from your kind, toward those other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside your singing
is to come back, if you can, to your own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when you have lived a long time alone. 

-Galway Kinnell (1990)