[stylist] Poem - "Death" - Final (?) Draft

[William L Houts]

Good Morning,

Here's a Big Topic poem I wrote a couple of months ago, one of those big 
perennial subject poems which everyone wants to write and rarely gets 
to.  I'm not saying this one is Dante or something, but I think it has 
legs and goes places.



--Bill


---


*Death *

We turn away, seeking some safe

direction but landing on down.

If Death said anything, saw anything,

it might be our eyes and mouths: closing, closing,

lids aflutter before the final fix.

Of course I'm making myth when all

myths are silly, senile:stories for the terrified at

sixty or six.But I've got a sense,

a sneaky notion that

something precious persists afterwise,

something unknown, unhoped for, more gracious

than we commonly allow for after years

of daily dirge. We're worth it, you know,

even our worst. And we might keep baseball

and sewing and fudge. I'll not say more, except

to guess that death is the grandest of pantomimes:

passionate, keen, false as movieland ghouls

--and black and white harsh.



WLH 11/5/14