Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Jack Gilbert’s “Convalescing” (Collected Poems, New York: Knopf, 2012, p. 384), which Elizabeth Traugott passed on to me after reading a fascinating obit for Gilbert in the NYT:

I spend the days deciding
On a commemorative poem.
Not, luckily, an epitaph.
A quiet poem
to establish the fact of me.
As one of the incidental faces
in those stone processions.
Carefully done.
Not claiming that I was
at any of the great victories.
But that I volunteered.

This entry was posted on November 22, 2012 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Death notices, Holidays, My life, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.