Place and Time ...We're all pillars of salt. ...Where does the music come from and where does it go when it's over— the child's unanswered question a… - Lisel Mueller

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Place and Time
...We're all pillars of salt.
...Where does the music come from
and where does it go when it's over—
the child's unanswered question
about more than music.
My mother is dead, and the piano
...burned with our city in World War II.
...it's still her black Bechstein
each concert pianist plays for me
and... her... fingers
are behind each virtuoso performance
on the stereo, giving me back
my prewar childhood city
intact and real.

English
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About Lisel Mueller

(born Elisabeth Neumann, February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the , Elmhurst College and . She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the in 1981 and the for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.

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Additional quotes by Lisel Mueller

Why I Need the Birds
...By the time I arrive at evening,
...they are turning
into the dreamwork of trees;
and all of us...
myself and the purple finches,
and rusty blackbirds,
the ruby cardinals,
the white-throated sparrows
with their liquid voices—
ride the dark curve of the earth
toward daylight, which they announce
from their high lookouts
before dawn has quite broken...

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On Finding a Bird's Bones in the Woods
Even Einstein, gazing
at the slender ribs of the world,
...even he, unlearning
the bag and baggage of notion,
must have kept some shred
in which to clothe that shape,
as we, who cannot escape
...swaddle
this tiny world of bone
in all that we have known...

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