By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

by Elizabeth Smart

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?

The typewriter is guilty with love and flowery with shame, and to me it speaks so loudly I fear it will communicate its indecency to casual visitors.

No, my advocates, my angels with sadist eyes, this is the beginning of my life, or the end.

I am as at sea, and as ignorant and mystified, as the first day I ever saw algebra.

So I say now, for the record of my own self, and to remember when I may be other than I am now: In spite of everything so strong in dissuasion, so rampant in disapproval, I saw then that there was nothing else anywhere but this one thing; that neither nunneries nor Pacific Islands nor jungles nor all the jazz of America nor the frenzy of warzones could hide any corner which housed an ounce of consolation if this failed. In all states of being, in all worlds, this is all there is.

Who weeps for the angels, though, or notices when they turn aside to stiffen their upper lips?

By the Pacific I wander like Dido, hearing such a passion of tears in the breaking waves, that I wonder why the whole world isn’t weeping inconsolably.

All my polestars have become falling stars.