echo

I read this excerpt from the poem "The Old Life" by Donald Hall - sent to me by the Writer's almanac.

It made me realize again that much of the emotions we have are an echo of the feelings and responses we had to a similar earlier incident. If we are to heal, not only do we need to address the present echo, but we also need to address its source.

 

Poem: excerpt from "The Old Life" by Donald Hall, from The Old Life. © Houghton Mifflin Company. 
There are miseries
of childhood that an old man's mind—alien
in the hour of injections
and restraints, ignorant of what
day or season it is—
will clutch to itself with angry tears.
I wanted a Mickey Mouse
watch as much as, later in life,
I wanted a job,
a prize, or a woman. It disappeared
a month after my fifth
birthday, and sixty years afterward
I grieve for it whenever
I regret something lost.