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To

By Franz Wright b. 1953 Franz Wright

Before you were I loved you

and when you were born

and when you took your first step

Although I did not know

good luck I want to say

lone penguin keep sturdily waddling

in the direction of those frozen mountains sister

of desolate sanctity

I want to scream

Although I did not know you

I loved you later on

as just a weedy thing

a little skeleton I loved

Both long pre-you a child myself

and as a man in retrospect

I loved and I was there

while they were raping you

I loved although

like God

that’s all that I could do—

Source: Poetry (December 2009).

Biography

Franz Wright’s collections of poetry include The Beforelife (2001), God’s Silence (2006), and Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. He has received a Whiting Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for his poetry. Wright has translated poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and Rene Char; in 2008 he and his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, co-translated a collection by the Belarusian . . .

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