Showing posts with label Louise Glück. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louise Glück. Show all posts

Sunday, October 18, 2020

crossroads

 
 

 

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
 
 
 
 
Louise Glück
 from A Village Life
with thanks to brain pickings

 
 

Thursday, October 8, 2020

the wild iris


.


At the end of my suffering 
there was a door.

 
Hear me out: that which you call death 
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. 
Then nothing. The weak sun 
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive 
as consciousness 
buried in the dark earth. 
Then it was over: that which you fear, being 
a soul and unable 
 to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth 
bending a little. And what I took to be 
birds darting in low shrubs. 

You who do not remember 
passage from the other world 
I tell you I could speak again: whatever 
returns 
from oblivion returns to find a voice: 

from the center of my life came 
a great fountain, deep blue 
shadows on azure sea water.



~ Louise Glück





witchgrass





 
Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder -

If you hate me so much don't bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything -

as we both know, if you worship
one god, you only need 
one enemy -

I'm not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore 
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure.  One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can't rest until
you attack the cause,
meaning
whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion -

It was not meant 
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don't need your praise
to survive.  I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I'll be here when only the sun and moon 
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.



~ Louise Gluck
from The Wild Iris