All about: death

Reading: Zebra by C.K. Williams
The great American poet C.K. Williams (1947-2015) writes in characteristically very long lines. He was a very engaged poet, for example with the nuclear disaster at Three Miles Island in Tar. He earned many awards and honors (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize). I read a seemingly simple poem called Zebra: Zebra Kids once carried tin ...
Reading: Lives by Derek Mahon
We travel to Northern Ireland. Derek Mahan (b. 1941)'s poetry has been compared to Louis MacNeice and W.D. Auden. Some critics have called it 'too controlled'. I found this poem worth reading, with an attribution to yet another famous Irish poet: Lives (for Seamus Heaney) First time out I was a torc of gold And ...
Reading: A prayer that will be answered by Anna Kamieńska
Anna Kamieńska (1920-1986) was a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and children's book author. I read a short elegy by her hand, in a translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh A prayer that will be answered Lord let me suffer much and then die Let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind not ...
Reading: A Dirge by Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was an American poet and Trappist monk in Kentucky who published over 70 books including a very popular autobiography. I selected a poem about the victims of war (Merton was a social activist) because I like its powerful language: A dirge Some one who hears the bugle neigh will know How cold ...
Reading: For The Anniversary Of My Death by W.S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin (b. 1927) is an American poet who became famous as an anti-war poet in the 1960s. He later developed an interest in buddism and deep ecology and moved to an old banana plantation on Maui, Hawai, which he restored to its original rainforest state. I read a timeless poem about celebrating the anniversary ...
Reading: Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was a giant of Northern Irish poetry. He translated Beowulf into lively,  modern language. Heaney was an immensely popular ambassador of poetry. Today, I read 'Strange fruit' - what a muscular and earthly use of language: Strange Fruit Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd. Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. ...
Death is not my friend
your grave is paid until the end of the decade when a yellow bulldozer comes rolling on the churchyard gravel somebody is paid to do this, paid. it won't take long, they are discreet your stone becomes the pavement on which children meet or some guy commits a heinous crime and your memory is strung ...
Tableau I
, in which we are all gummy bears competing with each other on the birthday table of a child who has yet to be diagnosed colorblind
Reading: Stagnant water by Wen Yiduo
Chinese poet Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) was assassinated by the Kuomintang. According to many, he was an important figure in Chinese intellectual life. He "Wen never resolved the conflicts that existed within him: The elitist and the proletarian, the scholar and the activist, the traditionalist and the innovator, the personal man and the public man, fought ...