Lucie Brock-Broido

Lucie Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia on May 22, 1956, to parents David Broido, a real estate developer, and Virginia Broido ( née Brock) an actress. Her father died when she was twelve, and

You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World

by Lucie Brock-Broido 1956–2018

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14

Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship Or a child

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

In the 1930s Toward the iron lung of polio.

According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched.

The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

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