Charles Simic Quote

The truth is dark under your eyelids.What are you going to do about it?The birds are silent; there's no one to ask.All day long you'll squint at the gray sky.When the wind blows you'll shiver like straw.A meek little lamb you grew your woolTill they came after you with huge shears.Flies hovered over open mouth,Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,The bare branches reached after them in vain. Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldierOf a defeated army, you'll stay at your post,Head bared to the first snow flake.

Charles Simic

The truth is dark under your eyelids.What are you going to do about it?The birds are silent; there's no one to ask.All day long you'll squint at the gray sky.When the wind blows you'll shiver like straw.A meek little lamb you grew your woolTill they came after you with huge shears.Flies hovered over open mouth,Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,The bare branches reached after them in vain. Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldierOf a defeated army, you'll stay at your post,Head bared to the first snow flake.

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About Charles Simic

Dušan Simić (Serbian Cyrillic: Душан Симић, pronounced [dǔʃan sǐːmitɕ]; May 9, 1938 – January 9, 2023), known as Charles Simic, was a Serbian American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.