Poem-A-Day April 29: An Exchange of Gifts

An Exchange of Gifts

As long as you read this poem
I will be writing it.
I am writing it here and now
before your eyes,
although you can’t see me.
Perhaps you’ll dismiss this
as a verbal trick,
the joke is you’re wrong;
the real trick
is your pretending
this is something
fixed and solid,
external to us both.
I tell you better:
I will keep on
writing this poem for you
even after I’m dead.


“An Exchange of Gifts” appears in Alden Nowlan’s 1985 collection An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected. This Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright died in 1983.

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