Lead
Lead - meaning Summary
Heartbreak as Ecological Attention
The poem mourns loons dying mysteriously in a harbor, likely from an environmental danger that remains unseen. Its speaker turns this grief into an ethical appeal: heartbreak should not become numbness or despair, but a lasting openness to other lives and to the threatened natural world. The warning to protect the loons' remaining refuge also suggests that human attention can endanger what it loves.
Read Complete AnalysesHere is a story to break your heart. Are you willing? This winter the loons came to our harbor and died, one by one, of nothing we could see. A friend told me of one on the shore that lifted its head and opened the elegant beak and cried out in the long, sweet savoring of its life which, if you have heard it, you know is a sacred thing., and for which, if you have not heard it, you had better hurry to where they still sing. And, believe me, tell no one just where that is. The next morning this loon, speckled and iridescent and with a plan to fly home to some hidden lake, was dead on the shore. I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
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