If you don’t already know, Abraham Lincoln is probably my favorite historical figure (followed by Louis XIV, the Anabaptists of Muenster, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). I feel we would’ve been great friends, had we met when he was alive, and I hope someday to meet him in the afterlife–after receiving my long-awaited hug from Jesus, of course.
Lincoln was a person of great depth. He laughed loudly and often, and he experienced pain acutely. His passion for words and stories fueled and was fed by his curiosity for human nature, and his huge empathy enabled him to understand others in a profound way. All his life, Lincoln was characterized by his melancholy–different from depression, although some historians would label Lincoln’s emotional life as such.
Melancholy comes from feeling things deeply–not just sadness, but joy. From sensing the pain of others. From living in a world so paradoxically stuck between supreme good and incomprehensible evil. From the inevitability of death, and the persistence of hope.
Lincoln and his melancholy are fascinating to me, so easy to relate to. It’s not a surprise to me, then, that so much of my poetry begins or concludes with the thought of death.
It’s not Stage Fright
I’m not afraid of death.
Not at all,
though I am afraid of dying
It’s the last thing I’ll ever do here,
my grand finale,
and I won’t even get a rehearsal.
I may explore the stage before the lights come on,
stand there frozen in insecurity for a
long
and awkward
interlude
Who knows how long it’ll take for me to remember my lines
Funny, we don’t have an instrument
that measures the precise moment
a soul leaves a body
How much time is in the in-between–
after the brain waves calm
and the heart takes a Sabbath,
before you wake up
on the other side of eternity?
That seventh day of the soul
could be a few seconds, a minute.
Or what if the soul stayed put, unsure, inside you
for a day, maybe another six
to steep a little longer
and then float away, full of something like confidence?
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