Two Days After a Funeral

Dear Elzora,
I know, not a happy title for a blog entry. But it's been 2 days since mommy and daddy attended Donald's funeral and I don't really know what to say other than it was really sad. The hardest part of the day was not saying goodbye to Donald, I barely knew him. The hardest part was seeing the people I love consumed by grief and an overwhelming sense of loss.

I read this poem again the other day for the first time and it just fit. So I'm including it in this letter to you. It's a translation of the poem 'Lyudi' that was written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet in 1961. The translation was done by Peter Levi, S.J. and Robin Milner-Gulland and it was published by Penguin Books for the first time in 1962.


People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.

Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:

by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret words are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.

-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1961)

I purchased this collection of Yevtushenko poetry in a place called "The Bookwork" in Roscommon, Michigan for 63 cents. To me it's invaluable.

I love you Elzora!!
BTW, you are 9 months old today.

Love,

Mommy