“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.