I'm going to finish with a happier poem.
"The Poet in Heaven."
"What's heaven after all but chaos,
neatened up into the good and the bad
and the undecided, those rakes, those corseted mamas, who
wait in the foyer for the cool unguent of the beyond,
their fortunes of tomorrow?
Well, my soul has come to be courted, to be wooed,
to be won over to the good or not.
After all, while the industrious set their grindstones
to their noses, their wheels to their shoulders,
I've been a great, exuberant fund of misbehavior.
Like the sea, that indolent lagoon lapping at the sand
and creeping toward the barbecue,
I teach by showing what not to do.
Like the lily, I neither toil nor spin, but simply am,
apparelled in beauty, unworthy, unearning, un-Protestant,
and slightly screwy, really, because who in her right mind
would not want the Prince of Love, so blond, so
tall, so good?
In the great body of great works, I'm an inexplicability.
Like Penelope, I can't decide.
I'm that tousled, sweating heroine at the blackboard,
head bowed, whose sponge erases like damp prose the right
and wrong in one bold stroke and leaves only that blurred
and blurry path between this lesson and the next,
what she was supposed to know and didn't.
I am a pebble under the boots of history,
a loose thread, nothing, really, the unimportant and, therefore,
immortal."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]