It’s not at all unusual for a poet who’s been impressed by someone else’s poem to think, “I wish I’d written that!” I’ve never read a poem by the late Lisel Mueller – and I’ve read nearly all of them – when I didn’t feel just that way. Mueller died at age 96 this past February. Here’s the poem that stands as an epigraph to her Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” published by Louisiana State University Press.
In Passing
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
