Regular readers
who are not frightened away by the threat of poetry have probably noticed my
habit of being “inspired” by coincidences
of the calendar.
About
a year ago I noticed that it was the
mutual birthday of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, who had not much in
common except that they wrote poetry and died young each in a kind of pitiful
squalor. It was also happened to be the
night of a New Moon and where I was,
at least, a howling storm of darkness.
Writing
poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal
hubris for which I shall be justly punished.
But here it is anyway.
How Black the Night
October
26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath
Even the New Moon hides behind the
howling clouds.
Happy Birthday Dylan—
Why did you not
rage, rage against the dying of the light
in that pool of your own black vomit
at the Chelsea?
Happy Birthday Sylvia—
That same year, you dewy goddess,
you first emptied the medicine vials
and crawled under your mother’s porch.
Not ships passing in the night,
but
traversing the same black ocean
away from
home
to
something else.
Did you find what you were looking for
in worship
and whiskey,
in broken
love and madness?
As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,
Lady Lazarus, you wrote.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
But laying your head in a oven
is no art
and
posthumous poems
no
resurrection.
How black the night, dead poets,
how black
the night?
—Patrick Murfin
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