Sad Poets Society № 19

Letting go of identity with Ursula K. Le Guin

Photo by Firas Wardhana on Unsplash

Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Sad Poets Society. Today, we’ll be discussing “Leaves” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Let’s get into it.

Leaves

BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.

In her poem The Speed of Darkness, Muriel Rukeyser wrote:

Time comes into it.
Say it.        Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

I think she was saying the same thing as Ursula K. Le Guin—We are the stories we tell ourselves, but eventually, after many retellings, the story changes.