Poem-a-Day - "When Love" by Alicia Ostriker

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April 5, 2021 

When Love


Alicia Ostriker

when love floods a person
            it cuts
a canyon

that deepens year after year
            carrying silt
away leaving

the essential person
            revealed
letting everyone see

the layers of yellow
            sandstone, red basalt
grey granite

when love washes over a person
                        it washes
the person away

Copyright © 2021 by Alicia Ostriker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 5, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I have been fascinated for a long time with the parallels between geology and the human personality. Like the earth, we have layers deposited by our experiences. Sometimes we explode like a volcano, and sometimes our experiences can be washed away by strong emotion, leaving something more basic behind. Often I have wanted to feel my ego being washed away by love.”
Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker’s most recent collection of poems is The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Ostriker is a retired professor of Literature and Creative Writing. She lives in New York City.

The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

“Sunrise, Grand Canyon” by John Barton
read more
“Archeology, p. 28” by Vanessa Place
read more

Thanks to Jane Hirshfield, author of Ledger (Knopf, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A about Hirshfield’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year
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