Summary:

The first line of this short poem sets the stage: "It is easy to be fascinated with death." The next four lines sketch the play or tableau: "We pretend to prepare," children trying on our parents oversized clothes in front of a mirror and making believe that we are going to go out into the fancy nighttime world of adulthood. But the next line throws open our safety valve, "Yet we trust we are not truly going to dinner." In fact, it's all just a game: the clothes are really too big, our hands are much too small to handle the glasses and silverware, and we are just little kids, after all. [8 lines]

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This poem, told in the voice of a troubled, angry teenager, describes her determination to control her eating and her body. The eight, eight-line stanzas each repeat the same words at the end of the lines, in a modified sestina form, so that emphasis falls on the same eight words: "disappear," "smile," bones," "fat," "mother," "touch," "person," "guts." By the end of the poem, the girl is clearly suicidal and unable to control her anorexia.

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One day some people were visiting Chekhov and they wanted to talk about him, about his genius. The author was embarrassed. He asked them, "Do you like chocolates?" Although the visitors were reticent at first, Anton P. Chekhov encouraged them to speak. Soon everyone was talking about his or her preference in chocolates, relishing the fine points of "almonds and Brazil nuts" and "the flavor of shredded coconut." Later, in the coach on the way home, the people felt that their conversation with Chekhov was very successful. [30 lines]

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A son beseeches his elderly father to fight, rather than accept, death: "Do not go gentle into that good night." He gives examples of how "wise men," "good men," "wild men," and "grave men" "rage against the dying of the light," and begs his father to do the same.

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The author begins by avowing that he would never "mourn the majesty and burning of the child's death." He expresses the utter inadequacy of mere words to describe any child's passing.

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This poem--"not graveyard roses"--is the poet's gift to her dead friend Bulgakov. He was defiant and steadfast in the face of all the tragedies of his "high, stricken life." While others may not raise their voices to praise Bulgakov (because of the danger of doing so in Stalinist Russia), "one voice at least / Must break that silence, like a flute." The poet remarks how amazing it is that she who has lost so much in her life should now be eulogizing "one so full of energy / And will" who "only yesterday" was "hiding the illness crucifying him." [20 lines]

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This translation of Akhmatova’s poem contains only 79 words, including articles and prepositions. There are 12 lines, consisting of a small number of sentences and parts-of-sentences. Why is it worth including in this database?

With a few words, the author sketches the lonely city at night, then comments, "Some good-for-nothing--who knows why--/ made up the tale that love exists on earth." What is the result of this story? Most people, in fact, believe that love exists, and they organize their lives around this belief. They sing, they dance, "they wait eagerly for meetings." The truth that love does not exist is a secret, which only "reveals itself to some . . . " Unfortunately, "I found this out by accident / and now it seems I’m sick all the time." Thus, the poem begins with a fiction (love exists) that seems to make most people happy, and it ends with a fact (love does not exist) that causes sickness rather than happiness. [12 lines]

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This long-lined poem is an eloquent and angry diatribe directed toward the god who wasn't there, a god who, if he had been present to them, would have saved the poet's father and his family from another god who DID appear in their lives, the god of amphetamine.

The god of amphetamine is "the god of wrecked / lives, and it's only he who can explain how my doctor father, / with a gift of healing strangers and patients alike, left so many / intimate dead in his wake." He is the god of diet pills, of the "rampant mind," and of "tiny, manic orderings in the midst of chaos." He is also the god of terrible and destructive scenes in the poet's family, because, in fact, the poet's father was the high priest of this god, "preaching its gospel, lifting it like a host and / intoning . . . Put out your tongue and receive it." [37 lines]

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A corporate narrator ("We here at Progressive Health") thanks the poem's addressee (presumably the poet) for "being one of the generous few who've promised / To bequeath your vital organs to whoever needs them." However, the narrator goes on to point out that there is another, even more generous, step he could take, by "acting a little sooner than you expected." In fact, why not turn tomorrow morning's routine physical examination, which wouldn't ordinarily benefit anyone except the poet himself, into a splendid opportunity to save six lives?

Yes, indeed, at this very moment there are six persons whose lives are hanging by a thread in the ICU, and the poet is a good tissue match for every one of them. If he would agree to have his liver, spleen, lungs and kidneys removed, and transplanted into these patients, he would save six lives.

Of course, the poet would die, but look at the situation from a cost-benefit analysis: The poet, who is "an aging bachelor," has perhaps 20 more years of life left in him and the poems he might yet write--even assuming they are better than those he has thus far written--are not going to "raise one Lazarus from a grave / Metaphoric or literal." On the other hand, the six potential beneficiaries have a multiplier effect because of their husbands and wives, parents and children.

The great gratitude of so many people will mean that the poet will be remembered after death--"Summer and winter they'll visit your grave, in shifts, / For as long as they live, and stoop to tend it, / And leave it adorned with flowers . . ."

Alternatively, if he chooses selfishly to refuse, and to grow old and die, his friends will likely forget him after death; and, moreover, his conscience will probably be stricken by having failed to respond to these patients' needs. The poem concludes, "You could be a god, one of the few gods / Who, when called on, really listens?" [48 lines]

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A patient expresses his anger and frustration with the physicians who are treating him. A recovering alcoholic, he feels particularly sensitive to what he perceives as the doctors' self-righteousness, and imagines how he would get even with them.

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