“Poem”

Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain,
then they fly away. But you and I
don’t do such things—

We climb the same mountain;
I say a prayer for the wind to lift us
but it does no good;
you hide your head so as not
to see the end—

Downward and downward and downward and downward
is where the wind is taking us;

I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer;
I sing to you as mother sang to me—

Your eyes are closed. We pass
the boy and girl we saw at the beginning;
now they are standing on a wooden bridge;
I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us,
but no, the wind is in our ears,
that is what we hear—

And then we are simply falling—

And the world goes by,
all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you—

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Excerpted from Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems by Louise Glück. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Louise Glück. All rights reserved.