New U.S. Poet Laureate Grew Up Abroad

Oct. 7, 2007 — -- The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic didn't speak English until he was 15 years old, so he was astonished when asked to be America's new poet laureate. Here is a poem about growing up in Belgrade, which was then part of Yugoslavia.

Charles Simic:

PRODIGY

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.

Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.
That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I'm told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.

She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.

Charles Simic, "Prodigy" from Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Charles Simic. Reprinted with the permission of George Braziller, Inc.Source: Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems (1999).