Dear Air where you used to be:²
To be grown up is to sit at the Table with people
Who have Died who neither listen nor speak—³
Imagination is having to live
In a Dead person’s Future.⁴
“Why are they Dead?” To this
We make no answer—there being None.⁵
Tell our Mourners to mourn in Red—
‘Cause there ain’t no sense in our bein’ dead—⁶
Grief’s damnable Tint is everywhere—
Darkening days we’re no longer aware of.⁷
The Dead who seem to take away so much,
Really take with them nothing that is ours—
The Passion they have aroused lives on after them—
Easy to Transmute, but well-nigh impossible to destroy—⁸
You die out in us: down to the last worn-out knot of
Breath—you’re still there—with a Splinter of Life—⁹
Where shall one go who keeps Memories of the
Dead, except Home again, faithful to the fields,
Lest the dead die a Second, more Final death.¹⁰
¹ Bell Hooks, Appalachian Elegy 10
² Danez Smith, Summer, Somewhere
³ Edna St. Vincent Millay, Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
⁴ Victoria Chang, OBIT [The Blue Dress]
⁵ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
⁶ Langston Hughes, Wake
⁷ Patricia Smith, Black Poured Directly into the Wound
⁸ E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
⁹ Paul Celan tr. Michael Hamburger, How You
¹⁰ Wendell Berry, At a Country Funeral