By new names
and then no names
at all, their laws
will reach your land,
Lorine, to feed
on your much loved
marshy spaces
whose occasional faces
discern a stranger
from far off
but like to take
a break from well
or welding just
to talk. We can-
not extricate
a place from those
it’s made of, the sounds
it makes. But now
from Blackhawk
Island to Madison
to Washington,
geologies
thin; more things
sound or work
the same. Their laws
will reach your land,
Lorine, by new names
then no names at all.
Source: Poetry (April 2012).
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This poem originally appeared in the April 2012 issue of Poetry magazine
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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