Today’s poem is “Glukopikron” by Katherine Hagopian Berry. Her work has appeared in
the Café Review, Deep Water, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, Balancing Act II: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women, Strange Fire: Jewish Voices on the Pandemic, and
Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest. Her first collection of poetry,
Mast Year, was published by Littoral Books in 2020. Katherine lives in Bridgton, Maine.
She writes, “‘Glukopikron’ was born when, thanks to an amazing moment in Agnes Bushell’s novel,
The House on Perry Street, I was reminded that Sappho used the word glukopikron for bittersweet in the Greek the actual translation is sweet-bitter the word arcs into uncertainty. That frame seemed a perfect way to talk about maple syruping and the fear we all carry of endings. While the poem was written in the Spring of 2019, it seems, in retrospect, weirdly prescient. That trick poems have of growing with us and surprisin