Poems and Selected Pieces from Books                           Please feel free to email me any submissions you would like to add.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever:  I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Put away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden 1936

Submitted by Barbara DiStasio, in memory of Bob

The Paradox 

With the passage of time, we will begin to notice there are some aspects of Life Without Our Loved One that are… well, I never know what to call them.  Kate Braestrup describes this paradox so perfectly and beautifully in her book, “Here If You Need Me,” about the death of her husband, Drew:

Death alters the reality we inhabit; the death of an intimate changes it completely. No part of my life, from my most ethereal notions of God to the most mundane detail of tooth brushing, was the same after Drew died. Life consisted of one rending novelty after another.

 

Still, as time went on, some of these novelties proved to be blessings. And I had to learn to live with a paradox.

 

If Drew had lived, I would not have gone to seminary, would not be ordained, would not have become the Warden Service chaplain. There were places that would have gone unvisited and friends I would never have met.

 

So while on one hand there is my darling Drew, whom I will never cease to love and never cease to long for, on the other hand there is this wonderful life that I enjoy and I'm grateful for.

 

I can't make these two realities – what I've lost… what I found – fit together into some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand... on the other hand: just like that.

 

Your life will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction, and if you are really wise – and it's surprising and wondrous how many people have this wisdom in them – you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms. And if you are wise, you will fall against it and be held.

From HERE IF YOU NEED ME by KATE BRAESTRUP. Copyright © 2007 by Kate Braestrup. By permission of LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY.

It is just like that. A paradox.

Risk

And then the day came,

when the risk

to remain tight

in a bud

was more painful

than the risk

it took

to Blossom

Anaïs Nin