Sharing Powerful Memories

 “We look at the world once, in childhood.  The rest is memory.” – Louise Glück

 

Glück, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, was born in New York City in 1943. An Alum of Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, she is considered one of America’s most talented contemporary poets, her writing marked by technical precision, sensitivity and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death.  

The author of 12 books of poetry including Faithful and Virtuous Night, winner of the National Book Award, Glück also is a professor at Yale and Stanford.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Glück’s,

                                        

The Red Poppy

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

 

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