Poem of the Week

Editor’s Note:—

Our #poemoftheweek, The Lunatic is taken from Charles Simic collection “New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012.”

Simic passed on January 9, 2023, but left us with a beautiful oeuvre of poetry, essays, and translations.

John Ashbery discussed The Lunatic on a poetry podcast. Ashbery admires “the incredible lightness and, at the same time, toughness” of the poem, and the subtly evocative personifications of the snowflake and of night

The Lunatic

The same snowflake

kept falling out of the gray sky

all afternoon,

falling and falling

and picking itself up

off the ground,

to fall again,

but now more surreptitiously,

more carefully

as night strolled over

to see what’s up.

By Charles Simic