Poetry Reading

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FOURTH ANNUAL BLOGGERS ( silent)
xxxxxx POETRY READING
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THE FIRST NIGHT
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by
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BILLY COLLINS

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"The worst thing about death is the first night".

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Juan Ramon Jimenez

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Before I opened you, Jimenez,

it never occured to me that day and night

would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

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but now you have me wondering

if there will also be a sun and a moon

and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

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then repair, each soul alone,

to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

Or will the first night be the only night,

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a darkness for which we have no other name?

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death.

How impossible to write it down.

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This is where language will stop,

the horse we have ridden all our lives

rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

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The word that was in the beginning

and the word that was made flesh-

those and all the other words will cease.

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Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

But it is enough to frighten me

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into paying more attention to the world's day-moon,

to sunlight bright on water

or fragmented in a grove of trees

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and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

these sentinal thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.

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