Quote of the Day: Light Baggage

Another one from my English Comp binder, but I can't find the author attribution, so my apologies:

Light Baggage
(for Zora, Nella, Jean*)

there is a magic
lingering after people
to whom success is merely personal
who, when the public prepares a feat
for their belated acceptance parties,
pack it up like light baggage
and disappear into the swamps of Florida
or go looking for newer Gods
in the Oak tree country
of Pennsylvania.
Or decide, quite suddenly, to try nursing,
midwifery, anonymous among the sick and the poor.
Stories about such people
tell us little;
and if a hundred photographs survive
each one will show a different face.
someone out of step. alone out there, absorbed;
fishing in the waters of experience
a slouched back against the shoulders
of the world.



*Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and Jean Toomer wrote and published their best work during the twenties and thirties. At some point in their careers each of them left the "career" of writing and went off seeking writing's very heart: life itself. Zora went back to her native Florida where she lived in a one-room cabin and raised her own food; Jean Toomer became a Quaker and country philosopher in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; and Nell Larson, less known than either Hurston or Toomer, became a nurse.