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A poem of mourning for a person or event.
Oliver Sacks is going to die,
He tells us blithely in the New York Times.
He’s 81. His liver’s shot.
He’s blind in one eye
Though when both worked fine
’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
This is a prayer for the dead and dying -
and those that may never know a life on the outside
I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave -
You wouldn’t fit in your coffin
but to me it was no surprise.
All your life you had never fit in
anywhere; you saw no reason to
begin fitting in now.
When I was little I remember
We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a
generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then
stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval
three crosses appear
on the tv screen
following a
sweep of my hair
that felt like your hand
maybe i dreamt it
but i so badly
As Whitman sang the body electric
Goodwin sings the body forested:
dense stand of dark-trunked saplings
illumined by a blood-streaked sky,
ominous forest where
abandoned children wander
Freezes, goes blue screen, shuts down. Dead pixel, dark.
Ghost echoes, lossy in the source code. Time zones away,
people who have actually shaken hands with my online friend
they say we are a family that is good at death / i make a decision to hold
a seminar on how to live / i schedule this party for my uncles on the first
day of spring / my dead uncles play hooky with the afterlife
When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car
the policeman was waiting. Gun raised.
I use the past tense though this is irrelevant
in Daniel's language, which is sign.
Unless you believe in the eye of the needle
this kind of poverty will never be about material
it won't be about ragged clothing
or mud huts with broken walls
or river blindness
or murram roads
the spirit of
your flowers is
my favourite shelter
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said. O God.
i ask mama
about residential school
she says no
i ask her again
the third time
i stop listen
to her silence
I recited to him,
Now as I was young and easy,
and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,
the law mandates that a hate crime only be classified as such if there
is ample evidence to show that one’s actions were motivated by
prejudice toward an individual’s nationality, ethnicity, sexuality,
gender, etc.
for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.
I wanna live, son. But which son are you?
There where the rivers are made
of moonshine and the lights still wait,
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
Now I set out across a minefield,
space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over
from a point where every pebble may explode
beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up
behind my body as I gasp for air,
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
I.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
His Grace! impossible! what dead!
Of old age too, and in his bed!
And could that mighty warrior fall?
On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred
What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
