Poetry Breaks: Robert Bly Reads "Winter Poem"

The Poetry Breaks series is a series of videos filmed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by creator Leita Luchetti, who co-produced the series with the WGBH New Television Workshops. Poetry Breaks features short videos of internationally renowned poets reading their work, reading the work of other poets, and discussing their takes on poetry in a variety of locations. The Academy of American Poets has partnered with Luchetti to present these videos once again.

[@bredamaune2028]

A brilliant, insightful poem.

[@bburskey33]

I want to see more of these poems by Robert Bly from this recording session. Are there more?

[@MaryKingsley-py4js]

No more. And he is gone...

[@TheLozissou]

What a marvelous, silent-speaking, just apparently cold interpretation!

[@halsie66]

RIP

[@littoy]

Winter Poem
The quivering wings of the winter ant
wait for lean winter to end.
I love you in slow, dim-witted ways,
hardly speaking, one or two words only.
What caused us to live hidden?
A wound, the wind, a word, a parent.
Sometimes we wait in a helpless way,
awkwardly, not whole and not healed.
When we hid the wound, we fell back
from a human to a shelled life.
Now we feel the ant’s hard chest,
the carapace, the silent tongue.
This must be the way of the ant,
the winter ant, the way of those
who are wounded and want to live:
to breathe, to sense another, and to wait.

[@Beatboxerskills]

thought he was saying "ant" the whole time

[@thibaultcseko3477]

Isn't it what he's saying?

[@Beatboxerskills]

@@thibaultcseko3477 ahh i thought he was saying "end"

[@juventusventuno9213]

The quivering wings of the winter ant
wait for lean winter to end.
I love you in slow, dim-witted ways,
hardly speaking, one or two words only.
What caused us to live hidden?
A wound, the wind, a word, a parent.
Sometimes we wait in a helpless way,
awkwardly, not whole and not healed.
When we hid the wound, we fell back
from a human to a shelled life.
Now we feel the ant’s hard chest,
the carapace, the silent tongue.
This must be the way of the ant,
the winter ant, the way of those
who are wounded and want to live:
to breathe, to sense another, and to wait.
― Robert Bly, in Eating the Honey of Words