These are beautiful poems to read at a museum — art & history references.

“Near the Sacrificial Site

Paestum, 1997

On an afternoon like this

I want permission to forget

the many varieties of cruelty.

I want the only figures of the past to be ancestors of these wild

poppies, of this chestnut tree

whose blossoms break through the hardest wood. I know that cruelty flourishes just down the road, persistent as these gnarled roots which overrun

the partly ruined woods.

But on an afternoon like this-

Old Master clouds and waterfalls of light-

I ask for the mercies of amnesia.

I want to open myself to the sun

which I know has killed

with its munificence,

to smell the foxglove

with no thought of the poison

hidden in its leaf.”

~Linda Pastan