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IFRAME: widget Language Portraits Language Portraits Bob Holman on the Nuyorican, oral tradition, and how poetry led him to activism. By Adam Plunkett Read more articles * Share * Print * Nostalgia Nostalgia By Billy Collins b. 1941 Billy Collins Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework. Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon, and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today. Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone. Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room. We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang. These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code. The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big. People would take walks to the very tops of hills and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking. Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft. We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821. Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits. And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment, time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps, or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we picked berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe. Even this morning would be an improvement over the present. I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks. As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream. I was even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess. Billy Collins, “Nostalgia” from Questions About Angels. Copyright © 1991 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/. Source: Questions About Angels (1991) back to top RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem’s context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poet Billy Collins b. 1941 POET’S REGION U.S., Mid-Atlantic Subjects Time & Brevity, Humor & Satire More about this poem Billy Collins Biography Dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by Bruce Weber in the New York Times, Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender or profound observation on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. John Updike praised Collins for writing “lovely poems...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all . . . Continue reading this biography back to top Poems by Billy Collins * Aristotle * Canada * Cheerios * Creatures * Design * More poems by Billy Collins (31 poems) + Fishing on the Susquehanna in July + Forgetfulness + Her + Introduction to Poetry + Irish Poetry + Madmen + Man in Space + Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne + Morning + No Time + Print + Questions About Angels + Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles + Report from the Subtropics + Silence + Snow Day + Study in Orange and White + The Breather + The Chairs That No One Sits In + The Death of Allegory + The Parade + The Wires of the Night + Today + Winter + Workshop + Writing in the Afterlife back to top Poem Categorization SUBJECT Time & Brevity, Humor & Satire POET’S REGION U.S., Mid-Atlantic If you disagree with this poem's categorization, make a suggestion. back to top Related Audio * Listen Poem of the Day: Aristotle * Listen Poetry Lectures: Billy Collins * Listen Essential American Poets: Billy Collins: Essential American Poets * Listen Poem of the Day: Forgetfullness * Listen Poetry Off the Shelf: Garrison Keillor, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan * Listen Poem of the Day: January in Paris * Listen Poetry Off the Shelf: The Joy of Sax * Listen Poem of the Day: Litany * Listen Poem of the Day: Liu Yung * Listen Poem of the Day: Man in Space * Listen Poem of the Day: Morning * Listen Poem of the Day: Nostalgia * Listen Poetry Off the Shelf: The Poetry Garage * Listen Poem of the Day: Silence Video * Watch Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and Aimless Love * Watch Poet Billy Collins Reflects on 9/11 Articles * Animal Magic by Aidin Vaziri * Talking To, Talking About, Talking With by Toby Emert * The Taste of Silence by Adam Kirsch Events * Billy Collins | A Reading * Elizabeth Alexander, Billy Collins, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, and Kay Ryan | In Conversation with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour Report a problem with this poem NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP [ ] poetryfoundation.org Biweekly updates of poetry and feature stories [ ] Press Releases Information for the media. 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