The Funeral as Poetry
"A poem is an effort to say something by organizing the images and the icons and the symbols and the acoustics of language. It is an effort to say something about what we reckon is unspeakable - great history, great love, great hope, great hate."
"Certainly a funeral is an effort at the same thing. It's the same enterprise, to organize some response to what is the unspeakable - unspeakable heartache, unspeakable helplessness, unspeakable despair, unspeakable gratitude, unspeakable faith. Funerals operate in the same way poems do. They operate by metaphor and icon and liturgy and symbol."
"We need a way to say unspeakable things and funerals do. So do poems."
Thomas Lynch -
Funeral Director, Essayist, Poet
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