This poem was freshly published on New Yorker July 14, 2021. It’s interesting and special in sentence pauses and word uses. See the brief introduction about the author, a currently well known poetess at the bottom.
这首诗刚刚在 2021 年 7 月 14 日在《纽约客》上发表。它在断句和单词使用方面很有趣也很特别。 见底部的作者简介。作者是一位当代为人熟知的美国女诗人乔莉·格雷厄姆，哈佛教授。
Why
By Jorie Graham
you ask me
again—why
putting your tiny hand on
the not yet
unsheathed
bud on the
rhododendron
and I see
I need to be sky
I need to be soil
there are no words
for why that I
can find fast
enough, why
you say at
the foot of the cherry’s wide
blossomfall
is it dead now why
did it let go, why,
tossed out
into what appears
to be silence
when I say
let’s run the
rain is starting—why
are we lost why did
we just leave
where we just
were why is
everything
so far behind
now as we go on I
see you think
when you reach
me again to ask
why when I say
are you coming now &
you say no,
I want to stay, I want
things to stay, I do
not want to come
away from things—what
is this we are
entering—me taking yr
hand now to speed
our going
as fast as we can in this suddenly
hard rain, yr
hand not letting go
of the rose pebble u found
feeling the first itching of
personal luck as
you now slowly
pocket it thinking
you have taken
with you a piece of
what u could not
leave behind. It is
why we went there
and left there.
It is your why.
Author: Jorie Graham
1950–
One of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation, Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry.
Jorie Graham was born in New York City and raised in Rome, Italy. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University.
About her work, James Longenbach writes in the New York Times: “For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption—intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic—rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems.”
