SEPERATION -- W. S. MERWIN
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Two days ago our good friend Elisha Witt passed away of non-hodgkins lymphoma cancer. We kayaked alongside him as students and coaches. We sailed with him on the Hawaiian Voyaging Canoe Hokule’a. He was an educator, a lover of nature and the sea, a bright and brilliant soul. He was thirty years old.
Like my good friend Mike who also passed this year, I do not post this to SuperForest out of sorrow or mourning. I share this as a celebration of life and as a reminder to squeeze from every day the juicy pulp of meaning and joy and beauty and splendor. No one did that better then Eli. This week’s poem is an elegy to him.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion -- BY DYLAN THOMAS
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
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