Lizz Murphy — Poem 64: When I am asked

WHEN I AM ASKED

after Lisel Mueller

No one had died

not then

they’d mostly gone

much earlier

Though part of me

went into the ground

with them

Paper merely fluttered

like Mueller’s deaf lilies

in my hand

I already had a pencil

knife sharp

in my pocket

My eyes were open

to new landscapes

the play out

of people’s lives

their grief

my own

Wind has no history

there is nothing else I can say

when I am asked

how I began writing poems