A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

When I Am Asked
BY LEISL MUELLER
Saturday, May 26, 2001
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When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
buy the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the rosed curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed by grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.