WEBVTT

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I'll tell you about these
ones I'm going to read.

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I felt very, very strongly.

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I'm sure everybody did,
but I felt so strongly

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I couldn't do anything.

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And so in the end
I thought, well,

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you're a poet you've
got to do something,

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you've got to write a poem
at Kennedy's assassination.

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And so I did.

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I did write it
trilogy the first,

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but I didn't write it,
well, sometimes these things

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as all of you have no parts.

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Sometimes you write quickly,
sometimes you do not.

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The first poem of this
trilogy was written the day

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after he was assassinated.

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We were having a poetry
reading in New York.

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It happened just
a small one when

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I'm a group like this
except it was in a house.

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We didn't know
whether to have it,

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do not have it, been
planned and then

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we decided that it
would be in his honor,

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it would be better to do what--

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because he believed
in it and tried

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to further the arts and so
the one who the poet who'd

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gotten it together went out and
found his speech in the library

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and wrote what he said on poetry
at the opening of Robert Frost

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Library in Amherst.

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And then I wrote
this first verse

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one of the trilogy and the
other two were written later

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and the 3 is still
my friends know

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I sent out for the new
year and the third one.

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I read that first before I
tell you about the other ones.

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I don't know what all of you
felt but this is what I felt.

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"Say wildness slip
shock shaking wrong

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ring wrong in mind
darkness, birding

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me bird and burst burning song.

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Shame, scream, your
shoddy size mud blurred.

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We the partisans of love
kneel on cold stone floors.

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This life you send is our
life, yet we are here real.

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Only maniacs see an end.

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We do not understand goodbye.

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This bird immortal does not die.

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Goodbye word, raindrop, requiem,
terrifying sunset whose glow

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gates sit atop diadem.

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Who orders you turn love to go?

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Silence in its
inner echo, pensive

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as church sounding chasms
turns flaws to wind,

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speech into snow.

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And nails sheerness
slips through spasms.

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What bell rings out that
man is kind throughout

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this wilderness of mine.

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Know loneliness like love and
pride dazzles the instant.

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Take my hand, my promise that
no words will hide in death

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or flesh the touch of n.

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Death and life, you and I,
songs and like what birds sing.

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Eagle, sparrows,
gripping snow peels.

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Snow in my hand
oh take it friend.

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So our love grows
and immortality will

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seem in eagle's eyes
upon our dreams."

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