Poem for Sunday

Funeral Blues
By W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the
  public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever:
  I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

--------

From Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch, today on the blues, which is so frighteningly appropriate to my mood that once again I feel like some higher power is trying to tell me something. "The blues often express a deep stoic grief and despair, a dark mood of lamentation, but also a wry and ribald humor, a homemade political philosophy and a proverbial wisdom. 'When you see me laughin',' the singer Richard M. Jones confesses, 'I'm laughin' just to keep from cryin'.'"

And yeah, it's past the middle of the night, and I have to be up at 8 a.m. for an all-morning thing at my son's Hebrew school, and I should have been asleep hours ago and I feel like utter shit, but I figured I had better post the poem now because god only knows when I will be back here.

I did write one more for 's goodbye challenge: "Phantom". Because sometimes I have to write something just so I know I can write something, and something that's at least somewhat happy, at that.