He was barely 59. Fifty-nine!
I am always struck by how a person's death upends life as they know it for the immediate family, while the rest of us merrily carry on with our lives without any interruptions. Every death is perhaps also a reminder of how truly irrelevant we are right here on earth, leave alone in the cosmos whose vastness we cannot even imagine.
Such is life that must go on.
Lament
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
3 comments:
That's a real interesting poem, well written.
There was a death in my extended family too. She was 83, but everything you have written applies there as well.
The title of your post is intensely thought provoking.
Beautiful post and lovely poem. Returning the favour with one of my own favourites on the theme of how death just passes people by:
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Yes, poems serve such moments really well ...
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