WEBVTT

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Well, here's a half a
minute poem as a last one.

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And thank you very much.

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Very glad to see you all.

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And we'll meet out
in the hall I hope.

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And hope to be back sometime
and wish you all the best

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of luck in the future.

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This is a little poem, I
guess, about which I usually

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tell audiences something.

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But I think it'll stand at
this late hour just by itself.

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But it was-- let me
just say one thing.

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In my whole books,
there are only two poems

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that I've ever
written which were

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written at the very moment of
the event that caused the poem.

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And tonight you're hearing
both of them oddly enough.

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One was "The Cancer Cells,"
which was written immediately

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upon seeing a picture in
Life magazine of the spread

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of these cancer cells.

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And this one when
I almost ran over

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a little squirrel in my
car, an experience that

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many people have had or
some such experience.

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And I pulled to the side of
the road, found I'd missed him,

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was terribly nerved up.

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And for three or four
minutes, had a sort

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of feeling of clairvoyance
as if I understood everything

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about this little
creature in relation

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to me, in relation to
time, space, and infinity.

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And so I had a pencil
there and I wrote this poem

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down exactly the way it is.

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You see it had happened
to be a good fate

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but it could have been
the opposite kind of fate.

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And what does the-- how do you
ever figure these things out?

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You know.

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It's impossible.

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"On a Squirrel Crossing the
Road in Autumn in New England."

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"It is what he does not know,
crossing the road under the elm

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trees, about the
mechanism of my car,

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about the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts,

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about Mozart, India,
Arcturus that wins my praise.

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I engage at once in
whirling squirrel praise.

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He obeys the orders of
nature without knowing them.

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It is what he does not know
that makes him beautiful,

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such a knot of little
purposeful nature.

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I who can see him as he
cannot see himself repose

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in the ignorance
that is his blessing.

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It is what man does not
know of God composes

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the visible poem of the world.

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Just missed him."

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[APPLAUSE]

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