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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Lauterbach
Ann Lauterbach
Ann Lauterbach is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Or to Begin Again (Penguin, 2009), which takes its name from a sixteen-poem elegy...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Tragedy and Grief
A Litany
by Gregory Orr
Against Elegies
by Marilyn Hacker
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martín Espada
Assault to Abjury
by Raymond McDaniel
Easter 1916
by W. B. Yeats
Facing It
by Yusef Komunyakaa
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
by Emily Dickinson
In Louisiana
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Lycidas
by John Milton
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
On His Deceased Wife
by John Milton
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Requiescat
by Matthew Arnold
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Rose Aylmer
by Walter Savage Landor
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
Stillbirth
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Surprised By Joy
by William Wordsworth, read by Susan Stewart
The Hour and What Is Dead
by Li-Young Lee
The Second Coming
by W. B. Yeats
The Stolen Child
by W. B. Yeats
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Hum  
by Ann Lauterbach

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.



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Reprinted with permission of Penguin Books, a division of The Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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