You can share here about someone who you learned also died today (such as the U.S. soldier or the five Iraqis today), or someone dear to you who died recently. And, visit Mindmouth’s diary about Terri Schiavo.
Robert White Creeley, winner of the 1999 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and a longtime professor of English at the University of Buffalo and Brown University, has died of pneumonia at age 78. Two poems, quite apt today, with links below:
Morning
dam’s broke,
head’s a
waterfall.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Goodbye
(From “Life and Death”
by Robert White Creeley)
Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose
itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run
or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head
of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.
It was Zukofsky’s
Born very young into a world
already very old …
The century was well along
when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.
But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,
did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.
