One afternoon about twenty years ago, someone on NPR read the poem “On the Island” by Elizabeth Spires. I was driving my car, and I was so moved that I almost went into the ditch. This poem is infused with tension between the past and the future. Here is one sentence: “We coexist with them, dreaming our dreams as they dream theirs, building our castles in air, in sand, not minding when waves or wind flood the moats and take down careful curling walls, calmly rebuilding with the patience of clouds, the dream we were dreaming beginning all over again.”
Elizabeth Spires, Worlding (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 22.