A favorite web site over the years has been Poetry Today. And a poet I have come to love is Ellen Bass.
When I Die is a wonderful mix of images, physical and metaphorical. The first lines are:
When my heart does its last
lovely squeeze, faithful muscle,
squishing one more glob from the
toothpaste tube of the ventricle,
when my lungs suck a final breath, claiming
their remaining share of oxygen that trees
and fields of corn and lowly roadside weeds
provided all these years . . .
The complete poem is here:
Posted by Donel at April 23, 2005 01:42 PM