An Unanswered Question If I had been the lone survivor of m… - Lisel Mueller

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An Unanswered Question
If I had been the lone survivor
of my Tasmanian tribe,
the only person in the world
to speak my language
(as she was),
...and if among all those people
staring and pointing and laughing
and making their meaningless sounds
there had been one thoughtful face,
who might have instinctively understood
...the indispensable word
I must pass through the bars
...what word would it have been?

Lisel Mueller

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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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Originators like Lisel Mueller:

Denise Levertov Conrad Aiken Joanna Newsom Louise Glück William Butler Yeats

Additional quotes by Lisel Mueller

Immortality
In Sleeping Beauty's castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world [unchanged].
...fear persists, and...
the anger that causes fear persists,
...its trajectory can't be changed
or broken, only interrupted.

Tears
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at the glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
...Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body.

The Laughter of Women
...Prisoners in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women
...What language it is ...
Long before law and scripture
...we understood freedom.

An Unanswered Question If I had been the lone survivor of my Tasmanian tribe, the only person in the world to speak my language (as she was), ...and … - Lisel Mueller

About Lisel Mueller

Additional quotes by Lisel Mueller