OK.
I'm going to read you one set of relatively, mostly, short poems
from this and then a couple of the newer poems.
So it is very important to me even
as I have become a poet of more public engagement I ended up
reading that last poem on the Washington Mall at the 2017
March for Science to something like 40 or 50,000 people, which
was a very strange experience because when
I talk about the bees, a whole crowd of people in bee suits
started jumping up and down and waving their signs and yelling.
And when I talked about the Badlands--
that actually did happen.
Scientists were tweeting facts from the Badlands.
From deep in the crowd there came this roar
and I thought, oh, that's where the Badlands contingent must
be.
Very odd.
But it is equally important to me
that poetry continued to address the private life,
the individual heart, interiority, the griefs that
come to every human being of every kind
sooner or later in this life.
And so I will give you a set of poems
that were precipitated by a diagnosis of glioblastoma
and three year long illness and eventual death of someone
I had known all my adult life.
Some of the poems speak more towards his dying, some of them
speak more about anyone's mortality, my own mortality.
All but the last start with the words "little soul."
That's taken from the one poem we have by the Roman Emperor
Hadrian who wrote a beautiful little poem on his deathbed
in which he called his own departing life "Little Soul."
And the title of this first one, "Amor Fati" is the Latin phrase
"love of fate."
Whatever your life is, embrace it because it is your life.
"Amor Fati."
"Little soul, you have wondered lost a long time.
The woods all dark now, birded and eyed.
Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.
The fairy tales warn you, do not go in, you who would eat
will be eaten.
You go in.
You quicken.
You want to have feet.
You want to have eyes.
You want to have fears."