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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jericho Brown

Raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Jericho Brown won the 2009 American Book Award for his debut collection Please...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems about Living
		"I'm afraid of death" by Kathleen Ossip

		Ashes of Life by Edna St. Vincent Millay

		August, 1953 by David Wojahn

		Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy

		Coda by Marilyn Hacker

		Daily Life by Susan Wood

		Difficult Body by Mark Wunderlich

		Elegy in Joy [excerpt] by Muriel Rukeyser

		far memory by Lucille Clifton

		First Things to Hand by Robert Pinsky

		Frozen by Natasha Head

		How to Uproot a Tree by Jennifer K. Sweeney

		I could suffice for Him, I knew (643) by Emily Dickinson

		Insomnia by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

		Life by Joe Brainard

		Life is Fine by Langston Hughes

		Little Night Prayer by Péter Kántor

		Living in Numbers by Claire Lee

		Lost and Found by Ron Padgett

		Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus [excerpt] by Denise Levertov

		Meditation 29 by Philip Pain

		On Living by Nazim Hikmet

		One Train May Hide Another by Kenneth Koch

		Primitive State [excerpt] by Anselm Berrigan

		Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky

		Spent by Mark Doty

		sugar is smoking by Jason Schneiderman

		Summer in Winter in Summer by Noah Eli Gordon

		Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert

		The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

		The Old Stoic by Emily Brontë

		The Pain by Laura Kasischke

		The Secret by Denise Levertov

		Thrown as if Fierce & Wild by Dean Young

		Variation on a Theme by W. S. Merwin

		Virgil's Hand by Francesc Parcerisas

		What the Living Do by Marie Howe

		What Wild-Eyed Murderer by Peter Meinke

		Where I Live by Maxine Kumin

		won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton

		Yellow Beak by Stephen Dobyns

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Another Elegy

by Jericho Brown

To believe in God is to love
What none can see. Let a lover go,

Let him walk out with the good
Spoons or die

Without a signature, and so much
Remains for scrubbing, for a polish

Cleaner than devotion. Tonight,
God is one spot, and you,

You must be one blind nun. You
Wipe, you rub, but love won’t move.

About this poem:

"Someone I loved died, then someone I loved left me, then this happened where I teach (now on a leave of absence). And I guess I have yet to get over Sylvia Plath's, 'I am a nun now. I have never been so pure.'"

Jericho Brown

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