‘To Write of Death’ by Jeffrey Essmann

If poets are supposed to write of death
then let me O! poetically regret
the beating heart abruptly stopped, the breath
that falls like lead upon the coverlet.
Let me intone the soft and wistful sighs
attendant on unwarranted demise;
and taste the tear that springs up unawares
when I espy the newly emptied chair.
But let me less poetically observe
the ragged edges on the human soul
where death has torn an ever-opening hole;
the place where long ago I lost the nerve
to calculate the agonizing cost
of lives I’ve loved to endless mystery lost.

Jeffrey Essmann’s prose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and numerous magazines and literary journals, his poetry in America Magazine and Dappled Things. He lives in New York City.