The Stronger



With me, life becomes sweeter,
so she loses some of
the ability to defend herself.
Yet even this gives her a forlorn
sense of satisfaction.
I know it by the distracted
half-smile on her face.
People believe love
can do so much! As when
they talk incessantly
about the weather:
they sound as if they're waiting
for something incredible
to come their way.
Nestled against me,
isn't she a moron of joy.
She loves to tell stories
because they're already finished
by the start of the telling.
Her favorites are driven by longing;
she reads and reads, fear rising.
But it often appears to me as if
she's taking elaborate pains
to hurt herself more accurately.
Deep in my heart, these things
just don't interest me:
the indiscriminate effects
of time. How the worst can happen.
So many things will lie
unrealized, that's the math.
The way she links things together
only brings out the violence.
Some of our perfect nights
you can't put into words.
And certain kinds
of defeat, they just keep you
talking through your hat.
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Written on 2021

Submitted by Drone232 on April 20, 2022

Modified on April 28, 2023

1:00 min read
288

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCDEFGBHIAJKLIMNOJJJPQIRISETUAVWXYZ1
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 1,014
Words 196
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 37

Sandra Lim

Poet Sandra Lim was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in California. She earned a BA from Stanford University, a PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lim is the author of the poetry collections Loveliest Grotesque (2006), which won a Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry, and The Wilderness (2014), winner of a Barnard Women Poets Prize. Of her poetry’s sometimes oblique relationship to “more legible markers or narratives of … racial and ethnic background,” Lim has said, “poetry always alerts me to the solitariness of individual consciousness, to the mystery of other people with other subjectivities, and to the conditions and dilemmas of moving through private and public forms of life. Perhaps being a writer of Asian descent makes negotiating those public forms more vivid, to be sure. A challenge for every writer, I imagine, is to understand that real exploration involves real risk; it can be scary and exhilarating even to discover unexpected aspects of one’s own sensibility in writing a poem.” more…

All Sandra Lim poems | Sandra Lim Books

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Discuss the poem The Stronger with the community...

2 Comments
  • Drone232
    I don't know. I just look for poems online and post them. Fill up the repository. It is a nice poem, though.
    LikeReply1 year ago
  • idc.malia
    whats the theme?
    LikeReply1 year ago

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"The Stronger" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/125195/the-stronger>.

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