Poetry Thursday - All Night by Lisel Mueller

Poetry collection in a 1992 notebook*

All Night

All night the knot in the shoelace
waits for its liberation,
and the match on the table packs its head
with anticipation of light.
The faucet sweats out a bead of water,
which gathers strength for the free fall,
while the lettuce in the refrigerator
succumbs to its brown killer.
And in the novel I put down
before I fall asleep,
the paneled walls of a room
are condemned to stand and wait
for tomorrow, when I'll get to the page
where the prisoner finds the secret door
and steps into air and the scent of lilacs.

- Lisel Mueller (1924-2020)


(Other poems from this ah hoc collection will appear in coming weeks.)


*In 1992, another page in the notebook reveals, my son - aged 16 - flew to Vancouver on 20 June and returned on 26 August after going camping with his cousins and eating lots of Granma's cooking. Whereas I holidayed, more briefly (16-30 May), in Madrid and Paris.