A Poem for a Thursday #306

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924. She and her family had to flee the Nazis and settled in Indiana, USA. Mueller won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her writing has “been praised for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.”

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

Sometimes, When the Light
Lisel Mueller