Awakening alone,
Proceeding on my own
To negotiate the day
As I’d done too long to say—

Now that I had a lover
That life of mine was over.
My next would be with her,
And doubtless happier—

Though fondness, truth to tell,
Inflected my farewell
To the solitude that I
Had been companioned by.

Daniel Brown's Taking the Occasion (Ivan R. Dee) won the 2008 New Criterion Poetry Prize.



This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 29 Number 5, on page 35
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