TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

As a poet and a teacher and the host of this podcast, I’m reading and listening to and thinking about poems all the time. They’re part of my life, every single day, and I feel very lucky in that way. Spending time with poetry each day improves my life, pure and simple. I hope that listening to The Slowdown each day, and getting a little infusion of poetry’s transformative power, improves your life, too.

I’m here, and you’re here, so I’d call us “poetry people.” But even people who don’t think of themselves as “poetry people,” people who don’t spend time with poetry each day, do turn to poems when they’re grieving or celebrating: at weddings, funerals, and other occasions that call for something more than we’re able to achieve with our own words. Grief, love, longing, gratitude—these are universal human emotions, and yet they are difficult to articulate! More than any genre, perhaps, poetry can help us say the unsayable. It helps to let poets take the reins.

E.E. Cummings is popular at weddings—“I carry your heart / I carry it in my heart”—and of course Shakespeare is a solid choice. At my wedding, friends read poems by Rumi and John Ciardi. I hope there will be poems read at my funeral, too, though I’ll admit that I don’t have any in mind yet. Maybe I’ll come up with a shortlist, or maybe I’ll let my loved ones choose. I wonder which poems might speak to them, and speak FOR them—because poems often say what we cannot.

Today’s poem grapples with grief, and with how inarticulate grief can be. It speaks to how much we need poetry—and poems like this one.

The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (I)
by Bob Hicok

My ambition to be done with ambition 
suffered a setback at my father’s funeral
when I wanted to say something profound
that he would hear, that a tree could understand,
that the wind would feel, but the only words
I could come up with were a handful of dirt.
The sound of it hitting his coffin,
as if shouting at him, woke me up
and I took my clothes off and walked away,
back into my life as his child,
when all I wanted was to hold his hand.
I am now fathered but fatherless, a being
whose being can half be traced
to a hole in the ground,
where my father’s beard is,
and his bones. His beard will grow
for a while down there and his bones
will never cast a shadow, and I’ll always know 
where to go to look at his name 
cut in stone. Rain, with patience
and the greed of love
to hold, will slowly erase his name
and everything it touches, it always sounds
like a eulogy to me, the sky
trying to figure out what to say
about loss, and making a mess of it
like the rest of us.

"The Eulogy I Didn't Give (I)" by Bob Hicok. Used by permission of the poet.