News of death by poem

I can’t get this out of my mind.

A dear friend of mine sent me an email recently, the body of which was a poem.  There were no other words to explain or define the situation.   No friendly banter or “Hey, how are you?”  Just the poem.  It struck me as to how much a poem can convey without explanation or fuss.  It popped up on my phone at 1:10am, in the dead of night.  I was sleeping poorly, so I checked email.  The poem, I thought, seemed beautiful, full of Canadian imagery and smells and sounds, things I could relate to on a basic level, as poet, as traveller, as lover of this country’s wild beauty.

The piece was untitled, something not unusual for this poet/artist friend.  She is in her 60s, eccentric, and brave as brass tacks.  I am quite fond of her and am glad to call her ‘friend.’  She conjured up images of prairie, of coming mountains, of tall pines, of wind rushing.  It spoke of two women driving westward, from Sudbury, in Ontario, to British Columbia, on the west coast.  “A road trip poem!” I thought, with glee, as I always love the metaphor of journeying outwards to find yourself inside.

The last stanza was a doozy.  The final few lines spoke of a mother’s passing, and of a daughter, grown up and weary of death and loss of love, speeding westwards to be there.  I thought, immediately, of deaths I have known.  Some have been gruesome, some calm and uplifting, some mean, some holy, but all have been utterly heart breaking.  We could choose to dwell on the darkness of death, but it seems to me that that isn’t where the lesson, or the learning, is at in a universal, spiritual sense.

It made me think of how poets do write about death, but mostly with the intention to enlighten readers about life itself.  I am tired of people saying ‘Oh, poems are depressing…’ when I know, with a strong faith in language and poets as a force to be reckoned with, that poems speak of dark and light things.  Sometimes, we need to know the dark to better see the lightness.  In this case, the poem was full of life, and then ended with a sudden, unfussy declaration of departure.  Shocking in its structure, it made me think how artfully it was built….how the architectonics of the thing lifted it up off the screen of the iphone and placed it in my heart.

While I can’t share my friend’s poem about her mother’s passing, I will say that my all time favourite poem about loss is W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues.”  There is a music there, a rhythm, that draws me every time I think about it.  I don’t need to re-read it to feel its beauty; its already embedded in my heart.  If you’re up for it, you can read it yourself at  http://allpoetry.com/poem/8493081-Funeral_Blues-by-W_H_Auden

peace,

k.