Poet's Choice

hoarse as my father, who had scared me once,

shutting a book and crying to some storm,

Arms, arms, sword, fire. That night, pitched forward,

I clutched a lineny square, but no tears came

for that desperate king until the swords

I suddenly thought real clashed for his throne.

Exits, applause, and I could breathe again.

My father said, "It helps us bear God's silences,"

and I knew watching was a kind of prayer,

a make-believe you play by looking hard.

It lifted him, as when, evenings at home,

dead still in thoughts about his sister lost,

he heard of cities bombed, while there, onstage,

Lear shouted, in a whisper, Mad, sweet heaven.

Basing a daughter's affectionate tribute to a father on "King Lear" is daring, and the effect is both amusing and poignant. The poem celebrates the majesty and even holiness of the theater and, by implication, art. The survival of words and characters for hundreds of years into a place and time that even Shakespeare could not have imagined is a marvel that Schulman conceives afresh. And by fitting her contemporary American idiom to the old cadences of blank verse, Schulman also celebrates us -- the always changing, renewed and not entirely incongruous inheritors of the art.

(Grace Schulman's poem "First Nights" is from her book "The Broken String." Houghton Mifflin. Copyright 2007 by Grace Schulman.)

Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poetry is "Jersey Rain."