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Kalden's Story

By Nate Klug b. 1985 Nate Klug

Drepung, Tibet, 1958

So won a name in this place,

handing off lath strips to a hammer's

measure, seeing the passing girls' slits

in roils of timber grain.

Mountains, barley, scaffold,

dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly

from the hoods of faraway bells

monks emerging like hairless animals.

I was sixteen. What did I know

of sovereignty, or the new soldiers

by the gate, chinning their shotguns

like violins? Nights, a tin roof

wind cracked flat; my sister,

flushed with child, hushing a child.

Source: Poetry (September 2007).

Biography

Nate Klug was born in Minnesota, grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and earned a BA in English at the University of Chicago. In 2010 he was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation.

Klug is a Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School and a candidate for ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Christian Century, Literary Imagination, Poetry, the Yale . . .

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