Running- Richard Wilbur

The poet Nichola Deane introduced me to this fine running poem a few weeks ago.
I love its exuberance, its helter-skelter line breaks and most of all its happiness and completeness-in-itself.
Who hasn't run like that, through 'jolted light' - utterly aware of your surroundings and the cambers underfoot, fleet as a hare?

Running- Richard Wilbur

1933

(North Caldwell, New Jersey)

What were we playing? Was it prisoner's base?

I ran with whacking keds

Down the cart-road past Rickard's place,

And where it dropped beside the tractor-sheds

Leapt out into the air above a blurred

Terrain, through jolted light,

Took two hard lopes, and at the third

Spanked off a hummock-side exactly right,

And made the turn, and with delighted strain

Sprinted across the flat

By the bull-pen, and up the lane.

Thinking of happiness, I think of that.