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Welcome to OpenLinkNight everyone! As you know OpenLinkNight is your opportunity to link 1 poem of your choice as this is no prompt-day. For those who missed the Mr Linky deadline this Tuesday’s poetics or any poetry prompts that you have missed in the past, this is the opportunity to share your poem. Out of courtesy, please link back to dVerse Poets Pub if you are sharing your poem.

For today’s post, I am giving tribute to one of America’s most talented contemporary poet, Louise Glück, (April 22 1943 – October 13, 2023). Glück is known for her poetry’s technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death.She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.

Here are two poems by Louise Gluck. Read more about her work in Poetry Foundation.

All Hallows
BY LOUISE GLÜCK

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

***

End of Winter
BY LOUISE GLÜCK

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity

never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you—

you won’t hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—

the one continuous line
that binds us to each other.

Björn here adding some sad news that has come to my attention:

One former dVerse poet was a victim of the Hamas terror attack a few weeks ago.
Her name was Debbie Shahar Toren known as Debbie Dawnslight and she was only active in the very beginning of the founding of dVerse in 2011. She blogged from the site https://butterfly2cocoon.wordpress.com/. I did not know her, but a few of you might have come across her poetry if you blogged with us back then.
Her story has made the news and it is a harrowing story of how she and her husband were murdered while protecting their teenage son with their bodies, all the time being on the phone with her father.
I don’t know how many of you who knew or remember Debbie, but she was part of our community and therefore I wanted to share these news with all of you.
To join us for Thursday’s OpenLinkNight, here’s how to join:
  • Write a poem in your blog.
  • Enter a link directly to your 1 poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
  • There you will find links to other poets, and more will join during the next 48 hours so check back to read other entries.
  • Read and comment on other poet’s work, we all go here to have our poems read
  • Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
  • Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like.
  • Have fun.
See you at the poetry trail. ~Grace~