I'll tell you about these ones I'm going to read.
I felt very, very strongly.
I'm sure everybody did, but I felt so strongly
I couldn't do anything.
And so in the end I thought, well,
you're a poet you've got to do something,
you've got to write a poem at Kennedy's assassination.
And so I did.
I did write it trilogy the first,
but I didn't write it, well, sometimes these things
as all of you have no parts.
Sometimes you write quickly, sometimes you do not.
The first poem of this trilogy was written the day
after he was assassinated.
We were having a poetry reading in New York.
It happened just a small one when
I'm a group like this except it was in a house.
We didn't know whether to have it,
do not have it, been planned and then
we decided that it would be in his honor,
it would be better to do what--
because he believed in it and tried
to further the arts and so the one who the poet who'd
gotten it together went out and found his speech in the library
and wrote what he said on poetry at the opening of Robert Frost
Library in Amherst.
And then I wrote this first verse
one of the trilogy and the other two were written later
and the 3 is still my friends know
I sent out for the new year and the third one.
I read that first before I tell you about the other ones.
I don't know what all of you felt but this is what I felt.
"Say wildness slip shock shaking wrong
ring wrong in mind darkness, birding
me bird and burst burning song.
Shame, scream, your shoddy size mud blurred.
We the partisans of love kneel on cold stone floors.
This life you send is our life, yet we are here real.
Only maniacs see an end.
We do not understand goodbye.
This bird immortal does not die.
Goodbye word, raindrop, requiem, terrifying sunset whose glow
gates sit atop diadem.
Who orders you turn love to go?
Silence in its inner echo, pensive
as church sounding chasms turns flaws to wind,
speech into snow.
And nails sheerness slips through spasms.
What bell rings out that man is kind throughout
this wilderness of mine.
Know loneliness like love and pride dazzles the instant.
Take my hand, my promise that no words will hide in death
or flesh the touch of n.
Death and life, you and I, songs and like what birds sing.
Eagle, sparrows, gripping snow peels.
Snow in my hand oh take it friend.
So our love grows and immortality will
seem in eagle's eyes upon our dreams."