“Lamium” by Louise Glück

[radiantfracture]

This was a prompt from my very-early-Tuesday-morning poetry group.



Lamium
Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don’t all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

* * * * * *

We have yellow maple here, but I couldn't say I'd ever noticed anyone of this description growing on or beneath it. As an exercise, I spent a minute imagining this lamium before I searched its image on the web; then I exclaimed "Oh, lamium, I do know you!" -- at lat in its purple incarnation. Another name is deadnettle.

Anyway, I think this is a beautiful poem, spare and in its way searing, the way ice can feel hot to the touch.

{rf}

Comments

[sovay]

a silver leaf
like a path no one can use

Ilike that.

[cmcmck]

But which deadnettle, white or red? It's a new name to me.

[radiantfracture]

The ones I've seen are the purple ones, but I wonder if she means white -- only because that seems colder.

[sabotabby]

Dead-nettles are a new one for me as well. It's evocative as anything.