Snowdrops by Louise Glück

Snowdrops
by Louise Glück

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

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Another Louise Glück to accompany The Wild Iris. Again, what she knows about the kind of dying you can do in a life and to arise to the return. Where the iris testifies to the terror of buried consciousness, the snowdrop testifies to the wonder and fierceness of unexpected return to raw wind in a new world. This also reminds me of Rilke’s “come back singing as you return to connection”. There’s something about becoming alive and renewed after a descent that I find really compelling, with a rawness that can’t be forged any other way, “afraid, yes…crying yes risk joy”. This is the snowdrop's poem, a companion to The Wild Iris, both spoken by flowers teaching the human gardener what they have undergone.