One of my favorite poems is “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon. It begins
“I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise.”
For the complete poem, please go to http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/050.html.
“Otherwise” first appeared in Harvard Magazine and was then published in 1993 in Constance. Jane Kenyon was born in 1947, and she died in 1995 after a fifteen-month battle with leukemia. This poem also appears in Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, as well as in her Collected Poems.
“It’s hard to tell somebody what you mean to say. And that’s an idea that I’m obsessed with. It’s why I write. It’s why everybody writes.”
--Jonathan Safran Foer
