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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. She is the author of Small Gods of Grief, which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Tragedy and Grief
A Litany
by Gregory Orr
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martín Espada
Assault to Abjury
by Raymond McDaniel
Easter 1916
by W. B. Yeats
Facing It
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Hum
by Ann Lauterbach
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
by Emily Dickinson
In Louisiana
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
The Second Coming
by W. B. Yeats
The Stolen Child
by W. B. Yeats
Other Pantoums
Iva's Pantoum
by Marilyn Hacker
Lawless Pantoum
by Denise Duhamel
Parent's Pantoum
by Carolyn Kizer
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Stillbirth  
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
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On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached—
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.



From A New Hunger by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Copyright © 2007 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Reprinted with permission of Ausable Press.


Audio Clip
April 5, 2007
Marymount College, New York
From the Academy Audio Archive
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