Snowdrops

“Risk joy in the raw wind of the new world…”

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring–

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

[ Snowdrops ~ Louise Glück]
Louise Glück is considered to be one of the purest and most accomplished American lyric poets now writing. “Glück’s cryptic narratives invite our participation: we must, according to the case, fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the import, and ‘solve’ the allegory,” [Helen Vendler].  Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island.

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