My Poems

Ashes To Ashes

Don’t go gentle into that good night

. . . . .rage, rage against the dying of the night’

The opening stanza by Dylan Thomas

No, Dylan Thomas,

You go and rage

If you so wish or desire

I have no time to fume,

To vent my ire

To kick, to trash

To set my soul on fire.

No, Dylan Thomas

No, not me, I shall be busy

Watching autumn leaves

Fall to their wintry ground

In silence of the coming night

To where we all are bound.

No, Dylan Thomas

To rage, to rant, you said?

I shall be way too busy

To gather all the gifts of life

Received with our neonatal cry

First smile, first frown

First laughter and first tear.

I shall be busy to recall

In silent memoirs, in letters, bold

In letter faint or small

Some best forgotten

Some to be sung in rhythm and rhyme

Some in a tenor grosso,

Some in a silent hum.

And having wished adieu

To stormy days of years gone by

I shall gift-wrap the rainbow

The one to never flood again

Only a chunk of it, a thimbleful

Only a bit of the setting sun

Before it dips below the crest

A fragment of an ogling moon

A star and all the rest.

In my falsetto voice

That none but I can hear

I shall declaim:

God bless an eagles wing

The merry flutter of a stripe

Of red and blue and white

A greeting lady by the sea

Holding a torch

A greeting issued just for me.

And when at last I close my eyes

Let ashes-to-ashes, in ashes’ idiom

Whisper, let him be the man he was

Dull at times or bright

And let no Kaddish be my elegy

Only the giggle of a little child.