Unstill, Unsaid

A friend of mine who I mentioned yesterday for the first time in months to a mutual friend emailed me out of the blue with a poem draft. She feels stuck at two stanzas, but it looks done to me. Maybe that can be true about life too, stuck can be reframed to done, in a positive light.

The exchange that ensued got me thinking about the short form of poetry. These have all (except for the one by me) been posted at some point during the tenure of this blog. And yet.
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Requiem

By John Updike

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It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!"

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Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

"I thought he died a while ago."

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For life's a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.and this one

Unsaid

by Dana Gioia
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So much of what we live goes on inside
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
or this or t
The Other Shoe
By Kay Ryan

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Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.


The Living End
By Samuel Menashe

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Before long the end

Of the beginning

Begins to bend

To the beginning

Of the end you live

With some misgivings

About what you did. or -
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Joni and Delmore and Me
Neil Fleischmann (1995)

Joni rides her time carousel
Delmore begins dreaming life
You run by; I pass your corner eye
You pause, wish me luck, and are gone