By Button Poetry
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Eric Sirota, performing at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
In 2013, I went to six funerals.
00:05
One, a good funeral is like a good wedding,
00:09
short service, long afterparty.
00:13
Two, I think of the dead mostly how I think of a friend who left town
00:19
until I catch myself wondering how they are
00:21
and realize they are nowhere.
00:24
Three, the answer to the question of evil in Judaism is humor.
00:29
God cannot stop tragedy so She taught us how to plant
00:32
laughter in its underbrush.
00:33
The point is, as my Grandpa always said, being somber is for Presbyterians.
00:38
Our death parties are more raucous than our New Year’s parties.
00:43
Four, the amount I mourn one’s dying is less related to how close we were,
00:48
and more to how much their death makes nonsense of the universe.
00:52
I hadn’t seen Maggie in three years, but when I hear she died
00:55
due to complications from a broken leg, the world becomes godless.
01:01
The sun stays out all night.
01:03
Things begin to fall from the sky at different speeds.
01:06
Maggie does not decompose into the earth to be reborn a tree
01:10
but rather sits in an underground box forever
01:13
and does the only thing that lifeless things can
01:16
which is turn into smaller and smaller lifeless things,
01:20
until they are just their own stillness.
01:24
Five, Roger Ebert gave the film Magnolia four stars,
01:29
even though he found it deeply flawed.
01:32
This sentiment closely parallels that of the eulogy
01:35
I delivered for my grandfather.
01:38
Six, my estranged friend Sarah jumps out of a window,
01:42
and two days later there is a funeral, and after the Mourner’s Kaddish,
01:45
I leave and drive to the first place I can find that is not a room
01:49
of crying fathers.
01:50
So I sit in a Burger King parking lot staring at a notebook,
01:54
wondering how to write an elegy for a friend I no longer loved.
02:01
There’s too much darkness in the daybreak for the sunset to be clean.
02:07
Too much darkness in your silhouette, your smile can’t be seen.
02:12
Another dark hole in this grassy knoll,
02:15
it almost seems obscene.
02:18
I’m sorry.
02:22
I’m sorry I hadn’t seen you in so long.
02:28
(applause)
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This post was previously published on the Button Poetry channel on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
