National Poetry Month: Kay Ryan

"Survival Skills"

Kay Ryan

Here is the virtue

in not looking up:

you will be the one

who finds the overhang

out of the sun

and something for a cup.

You will rethink meat;

you will know you have

to eat and will eat.

Despair and hope you keep

remote. You will not

think much about the boat

that sank or other boats.

When you can, you sleep.

You can go on nearly forever.

If you ever are delivered

you are not delivered.

You know now, you were

always a survivor.

"Survival Skills" appeared in the collection Say Uncle, 2000. It was announced yesterday that Kay Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.