Formal Elegy On The Death Of The Poet Gene Derwood 1954
I
There by the door have you gone all too quickly,
Shaken by the deaths of your hopes, hanging onto
Life for that still one last chance to get it all.
And did you go full of the pride
of your accomplishments,
Or in that deep well of pain
you called not your own?
II
Remember the bright star!
Always, we remember the bright star,
Gene Derwood, that was your Passion,
Remember the bright star as you sought destiny
Riding on a dove, sprinkled with lights
of sound and song.
Was it your nightmare in the midst of the body
of almost pure light?
Or was it also the single beam
that purified all that sat with you
In Greater Presence,
counseled to take the cup of choice,
Shaken with how much darkness, as well as light,
the Divine presents?
We are your mourners, in peace and in anger,
In wonder and in need of grace.
What, we ask, was your rosy crucifixion of soul?
III
Like the small-boned figure of commitment and daring you were,
So great the silences created between you and world,
Magnificent Mass and symphonies din-dunning out across
the valley of all our becoming.
I thank not the rusty stars, the lost continents,
the ten billion graves or so
Of the doss and waste that is existence
without commitment.
I hunger not for repeated sentiments
And endless change wherein the councils of the elite
make wrongful decisions
And the rank and file show infinite mercies
In trying still once again to make sense of it all.
I choose instead the way of your heart, the muse of
greater commitment,
Like the man whose dove fell into your hands,
oh, builder of nests,
Seeker after ultimates that sometimes never were.
And was it our job to stop you from going
into your wilderness,
There to taste your raw honey and wild locusts,
To simplify your life at the devil's mercy and God’s?
Was it? Was it your will or Greater Will
that took you all too soon?
And now to mourn, to deliver back to the West Country all that is no more,
To acknowledge the relentless grace within which
You were pursued in the journey towards death.
I know no bent appetite of the soul or timeless
wrangling with God
Since you through poetry made known the heart.
Love all, but make sure also your body
is full of light, not darkness.
And who among us will step forward to throw
the first love?
Who among us will step out and say,
It is only the body that passes while the spirit lives on?
I thank destiny, not fate, that I met you
In your prime, and with your true companion,
That you opened your arms of shattered love to me,
Though still among the vulnerable and the lost,
That you rejected me with honors
While making clear your parental inadequacy,
That you never lost your Greatest Love,
The healing of the world through Poetry.
V
Now in your passing we sense the light extinguished,
The last basket covering your candle at last,
The lingering no longer a lingering but a moving on.
Let us then honor your passing.
You return to your own, leaving us to the living.
Let us honor you in that you lived with grace
without too much complaining,
And we learned without learning,
That while your body dies, there is no death
in consciousness that moves us on.
We must leave now the grave of your loss,
The infinitude of sadness,
Return to our suffering and our gladness.
That it is utter madness not to have loved and lost.
Not to have redeemed oneself with endless tries,
Or create such gladness out of suffering madness.
That even in death you are reborn, not forgotten,
Not unloved, eloquent even to the end.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
We thank you in our lust.
God's madness turned to gladness
We are what you were, so trust.
Gene Derwood Williams,
Confined to eternity,
We mark your passing!
- Strephon Derwood Williams (as on the original birth certificate)