Archive 01/27/09 - (2)

   

The Death of a Writer

                                                                         

Tonight, driving home, extraordinarily carefully,

In the throes of a perilously slick sleet-and-snow storm,

I absorbed the news, from NPR's extended eulogy,

That preeminent writer John Updike had died,

Leaving behind, at 76, a legacy of sixty-one books.

 

And though I never appreciated his literature,

Certainly not his facile poetry or his patrician fiction,

Which exploited the nondrama of suburban life,

Indeed, found his "Rabbit" quartet tedious,

Something in my creative spirit trembled.

 

Could it be that his death, from lung cancer,

Distressed me to the depths of my sympathy?

Or is it, possibly, that being only eight years younger,

I felt my ephemerality all the more intimately?

I'm not sure, yet, that an answer possesses me.

 

All I've ever believed

Is that we who nurture words are to be venerated.

We alone guard the keys to the Library of Alexandria,

The clay-potted caves of Qumran, the Book of Life.

Even my most mediocre poems illuminate who we are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

01/27/09 - (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 
   
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