To Live Forever – Poem by Bruce Whealton">To Live Forever – Poem by Bruce Whealton
Published March 13, 2009 | 
">Bruce WhealtonI think some poets write
because of a deep anxiety
we feel about the finite
nature of our existence.
This may not be
something conscious
that we feel -
some of us -
but we may want to live forever,
in our poems
or in some way
not fade away
with no one to remember
anything at all
about us.
If this is so,
then I may be
one of those poets
and now, I’m writing
as fast as I can
these poems that I share.
I write this as a letter
“To whom it may concern,”
I turn to you my friends
family and other relations -
my readers,
and I ask you,
if anything were to happen to me,
I entrust to you
my poems -
the ones I’ve written
and the ones I will write.
If anything were to happen to me,
help me please,
to ensure,
that poems live,
on,
that should I fade away,
others will have something to say,
something about what I contributed
how I made some contribution -
some impression,
some way that I touched you
and that I lived for something.
It’s so easy for things to get lost
and then what will remain of me.
What do people say about me?
Or what will they say?
It is my greatest fear
and the source of my greatest
despair that the answer
to that can be summed up
in one word,
“Nothing.”
I think of these things
not because I think something
will happen soon to me,
but because life may not present
time or opportunity,
no matter how many years
I may go on writing.
Bruce Whealton – March 13, 2009
When I learned that my cousin committed suicide – Poem by Bruce Whealton">When I learned that my cousin committed suicide – Poem by Bruce Whealton
Published February 22, 2009 | ">Bruce WhealtonI heard that my cousin committed suicide…
Death itself is the only true evil,
destroyer of all…
all that we know or can know
is here in what we call life.
Death is the dominion of the Devil.
It is this that the Gnostics got wrong,
when the claimed that Heaven was good
and this existence here,
this world, was ruled by an
evil god – making this place evil.
Death is the great enigma,
hidden in complete secrecy,
shrouded in mystery,
the place where no one,
no one in existence now,
has ever gone.
Having not gone there,
having never seen death personally,
it has always just seemed like
an illusion…
something not real or possible.
Perhaps this is just a coping mechanism,
for dealing with the unspeakable,
pretending that Death
itself, does not exist.
When I heard that my cousin
had committed suicide,
last year,
I had to know how -
she hanged herself -
because that would be the only way
to make sense of what I was being told.
I wanted to say “No!”
or ask my sister,
if she was sure.
But I didn’t say anything.
I don’t think she really was thinking
about how permanent were her actions
or where she was going,
metaphorically speaking.
I think she must have wanted
to go away,
in her mind,
to escape, or retreat,
to some place of her creation;
But where did she get the idea
that suicide would get her there?
Death offers no hope,
no answers,
no meaning,
no comfort…
only pain,
suffering.
Death is the Devil’s domain…
the enemy of everything
we’ve ever known,
of everything we’ve ever loved,
of everything that’s ever mattered -
mattered to us.
I still don’t understand,
how my cousin could have thought
she’d get where she wanted to go
by committing suicide.
Bruce Whealton February, 2009
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