LOST LOVE
By Louise Gluck (2020 NOBEL LAUREATE FOR LITERATURE)
My sister spent a whole life in the earth.
She was born, she died.
In between,
not one alert look, not one sentence.
She did what babies do,
she cried. But she didn’t want to be fed.
Still, my mother held her, trying to change
first fate, then history.
Something did change: when my sister died,
my mother’s heart became
very cold, very rigid,
like a tiny pendant of iron.
Then it seemed to me my sister’s body
was a magnet. I could feel it draw
my mother’s heart into the earth,
so it would grow
Louise Gluck, the American poet Laureate of 2003-2004, has won the 2020 Nobel Prize for literature, as announced today evening, for “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”.
Her beautiful poems encompasses the natural, human, and spiritual realms, and is bound together by the universal themes of time and mortality. With clarity and sureness of craft, Gluck's poetry questions, explores, and finally celebrates the ordeal of being alive.
“Lost Love” represents the speaker as a victim of a family tragedy. She is the one lacking love and attention from parents too involved in their grief over another daughter’s early death:
“ Something did change: when my sister died,
my mother’s heart became
very cold, very rigid,
like a tiny pendant of iron. “
The poem describes how the speaker’s childhood was in effect stolen by the sister, who took her mother’s affection with her into the grave.
