Christian Wiman

[from Christian Wiman's Hard Night, Copper Canyon, 2005]

[from "Reading Herodotus"]

Confusion is to be born
into a people without names or dreams
to whom the dead must come in the daylight —
brief faces in the clouds, traces of familiar dust
to which you cannot call out, of which you cannot speak

"Reading Herodotus"

[from "The Funeral"]

the solemnity with which each head is bowed
as one by one, and row by row, they lose
themselves to a keen indigenous grief
that binds them cry to cry and tear to tear,
until its binding is its own relief

"The Funeral"