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Column 809

In Passing

Intro by Ted Kooser
09.20.2020

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
 

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1996 by Lisel Mueller, "In Passing," from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, (Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Poem reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.