Those of us in the newspaper business know what After Deadline means  …  Release, often exhaustion, certainly freedom from immediate travail.

Depending upon one’s time in the business, it can mean more or less of the above. I have been in good times and bad, but always, after deadline was a good thing, and sometimes it meant absolute heaven, more often of late.

As more work is required and less help provided, deadline itself has become more of  a reach for those of us who continue to care about the quality of the product. We must change with the times, limit our reach, be thrilled with less and be happy, so they say.

I’m not, and I keep trying to give what I think is verging on a good product, both in print and online. It’s tough, though. That video of the fire at Danvers Town Hall, for instance, still waits for my edits and production. Will it get done? Does it really matter?

Which echoes, of course, the great question of all our lives … does it really matter?

Poets love this topic, in one way or another, and here is a poem by Mark Strand, who I think is a terrific poet,  and this poem may or may not speak to the issue. … from his volume, “Dark Harbor.”

(Note: for some reason, this program does not allow extra spaces between stanzas, so I will indicate such a break with a space and then three dots.)

XVI

It is true, as someone has said, that in

A world without heaven all is farewell.

Whether you wave your hand or not, …

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes

It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,

hating what passes, it i s still farewell. …

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean

Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans

Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting, …

Are stages in an ultimte stillness, and the movement

Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body

Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being …

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion

Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,

Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings, …

The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken

The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions

Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end …

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it

In the temptations of sleep, in the the moon’s ripening,

In the wine as it waits in the glass.

Here is another by Mark Strand, to make up for my lack of attentiveness to the blog this week (mea culpa).

XL I

Sometimes after dinner when I wander out

And stare into the night sky and realize I have no idea

Of what I see, that the distance of the stars …

Is meaningless and their number far beyond

What I can reckon, I wonder if the physicist

Sees the same sky I do, a lavish ordering of lights, …

Disposed to match our scale, and our power to imagine

In simple terms a space like the space we suffer

Here on earth in this room with you sitting …

In that chair, reading a book of which I understand

Nothing, thinking thoughts I could not guess at,

As moments approach whose cargo is a mystery. …

Ah, who knows? we are already traveling faster than our

Apparent stillness can stand, and if it keeps up

You will be light-years away by the time I speak.