By Clive James
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
Via Slate
7 comments:
I think it's a shame that good people have to die.
I hope Mr. James was a good person.
Tweet I'm not sending for fear of loosing follows.
"War photographer embedded himself in a video game": That's one way to stick your neck out :0 (what? too soon?) http://ti.me/1m56RXt
Poetry is a dying... that's not nice.
It's a shame Hitchens had to die. All the insights he would have of things going on today.
Even when I disagreed, he had the ability to make me consider the possibility that I could be wrong, in ways few people have.
Was that tree nuked?
So Clive James is terminally ill, that don't make him a poet. He's like a million other fools who think poetry is all about getting breathy about something - gag me with a spoon - spiritual.
And I could set you straight about everything, Lem, but you won't listen to me and it pisses me off!
I love Clive James, but rarely read poetry. I read this one. Good pick.
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