Sep 19, 2022
After death
A Golden Shovel Poem
if i were to disappear, what would happen? i
must admit, it’s crossed my mind. i imagine
i would be missed, though for how long after death
i cannot say. i hope i would be so
lucky as to linger in people’s minds, though not too much
to bear. there is a harsh reality, it
seems, about how one feels
they should react to death, and how one just
-ifies said reactions to society. no one will like
every display of grief; some may not care about a
woman’s death, and for them, she will not become a memory.
Golden Shovel: “a poem that takes a line from another poem or text … and uses each word in that line as the end of a line in the poem”
Text used for this poem: from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory” (except I misremembered the lyric as “just” instead of “more” — oops!)
