Julie Suk

Julie Suk Poems

Aging through August, the hydrangeas
turn from pastels to brick and bronze,
...

I could make a wardrobe
with tufts of wool
caught on thistle and bracken.
...

His plane was scarcely more than canvas
stretched across board.
Gunned down by a German Fokker onto no-man's land,
...

The dead sift through us
without flesh, bone, hair,
or whatever else the stars concoct
for us to touch.
...

which explains why we shiver
when the heedless stars swing by.
...

At a distance:
seemingly intact piers,
dark recesses, blind arcades.
...

Three a.m., the house a foreign country I wake in,
same language but a different inflection,
a creak on the stair a harbinger,
...

Julie Suk Biography

Julie Suk (born Julie Madison Gaillard; 1924) is a prize-winning American poet and writer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of five volumes of poetry. Julie Suk was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama. She attended Stephens College and the University of Alabama.In 1944 she married naval officer Bill Suk. For many years she was an artist, painting landscapes in oils. It was not until the 1960s that Suk took up poetry, inspired in part by the work of French poet Saint-John Perse. She has lived in Charlotte since 1966.)

The Best Poem Of Julie Suk

Brueghel In The Hydrangeas

Aging through August, the hydrangeas
turn from pastels to brick and bronze,

the same rich colors tempering
Brueghel's Triumph of Death,

that ravaging depiction of pillage and war—
the myriad mutilations
we foolishly thought we would modify.

When we die, will our last glimpse be
of brilliance, a smear of color scumbled
over the sour realities left behind?

I wish, but then I look with envy
at two lovers in the painting
having at it under a tree,

the pair of them entwined,
her head thrown back, the creamy neck
exposed as long as paint holds.

Better than years of scrubbing
the resilience of dirt,
cheeks graying along the way.

True, Brueghel's faces are never
Valentine sweet—

you can depend on a darkness there
brooding below the pink.

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