29 Dec Beautiful Dead by Paul T. Hogan
back to bone and outline – there is joy here. Beige
meadow tagged with tall hollow stalks not so much
bent as snapped by dry, ice wind – to feel
peace with this means first you must stand in slop
up to shin, wiping hands on jeans stiff with it
already. These bony, sparse views are living,
not dead. Do you hear only silence, standing here?
Does this changed garden show nothing?
Drop down to a knee, let a few heartbeats pass.
Bring down your shoulder. So many things easy to say
about dying, standing up there, surveying and parsing.
But down here, it gets in your nose, charges
the back of your throat. When you stand, spit it out,
it’s the living you’ll taste arising.
About the Poet
Paul T. Hogan is a Buffalo, N.Y.-based poet, essayist, and retired non-profit administrator. He is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Points of Departures: Poems (White Pine Press, 2008), and Inventories (BlazeVox Books, 2012). A US Navy veteran and the recipient of the David Gray Fellowship in Poetry at the University at Buffalo under the late Robert Creeley, he has gone on to career working for and consulting with a variety of non-profit organizations in the arts, adult education, research, community health and healthcare. Just Buffalo Literary Center is one of the many organizations in the Buffalo arts community Hogan has worked with or for. He served most recently as the Executive Vice-President of The John R. Oishei Foundation, where he worked from 2001 to the time of his retirement at the end of 2020.
This poem is one of many responses to Just Buffalo Literary Center’s call for work inspired by the National Endowment for the Arts The Big Read Program’s “Where We Live” writing prompt.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.