Poem of the week

CRATER LAKE by Louise Glück

There was a war between good and evil.
We decided to call the body good.

That made death evil.
It turned the soul
against death completely.

Like a foot soldier wanting
to serve a great warrior, the soul
wanted to side with the body.

It turned against the dark,
against the forms of death
it recognized.

Where does the voice come from
that says suppose the war
is evil, that says

suppose the body did this to us,
made us afraid of love—


(Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author Louise Glück's new book, Averno, will be published in spring 2006. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Mass.)