Consolation by Wislawa Szymborska

Darwin.

They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

The Poet with His Face in His Hands by Mary Oliver

    You want to cry aloud for your
    mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
    doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

    So if you’re going to do it and can’t
    stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
    hold it in, at least go by yourself across

    the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
    of rocks and water to the place where
    the falls are flinging out their white sheets

    like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
    jubilation and water fun and you can
    stand there, under it, and roar all you

    want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
    drip with despair all afternoon and still,
    on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

    by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
    puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
    of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.