by Dylan Thomas
Fade to Black
It’s not easy to “rage against the dying of the light.”
It takes too much energy now in short supply.
Why fight the final fade-out to exhaustion?
What’s one supposed to do? Keep labouring on?
Continue to weave the tapestry of existence
as it unravels between arthritic fingers?
Or stoop to pick up another skein of fading life
even though standing up again is painful?
It turns out that Dylan Thomas, who coined
this rallying cry, died not from an alcoholic
“insult to the brain” caused by excessive drinking,
but from pneumonia and a dim ‘celebrity’ doctor,
Falkenstein, who pumped him full of morphine
having diagnosed the poet with delirium tremens,
maybe under the influence of the writer’s initials...
I totally relate & see your point - also love how this poem inevitably evokes a reaction (whether it’s love or its opposite), to me, that’s the sign of a well crafted poem
Thanks for the comment. I wrote it in September 2022 when I was a little more inspired than I am nowadays. :-)
I'm glad we connected and now there's a place for this work to be shared!
Such a dramatic reading. It begs the question why poets today don't read their work in this way.
Fade to Black
It’s not easy to “rage against the dying of the light.”
It takes too much energy now in short supply.
Why fight the final fade-out to exhaustion?
What’s one supposed to do? Keep labouring on?
Continue to weave the tapestry of existence
as it unravels between arthritic fingers?
Or stoop to pick up another skein of fading life
even though standing up again is painful?
It turns out that Dylan Thomas, who coined
this rallying cry, died not from an alcoholic
“insult to the brain” caused by excessive drinking,
but from pneumonia and a dim ‘celebrity’ doctor,
Falkenstein, who pumped him full of morphine
having diagnosed the poet with delirium tremens,
maybe under the influence of the writer’s initials...
I totally relate & see your point - also love how this poem inevitably evokes a reaction (whether it’s love or its opposite), to me, that’s the sign of a well crafted poem
Thanks for the comment. I wrote it in September 2022 when I was a little more inspired than I am nowadays. :-)
I'm glad we connected and now there's a place for this work to be shared!
Such a dramatic reading. It begs the question why poets today don't read their work in this way.