They can say what they like,

And God knows some of them say it very well,

But I am tired, tired as hell

Of poets who say grievously to a gravestone:

You are well dead, you wouldn't like to be me

In the cold rain looking at your monument-

I'm what you got for what you spent-

I am all you wished to be,

Citizen, creditor, parent, lover, laborer;

And look at me.

I wish the dead could speak.

Would they speak of being dead, and be glad of it?

No. They would push the rock and move it.

They would speak as living people, angry, loving,

Busy, believing they bad nothing to do with dying;

Something sick poets never thought of saying.

I'd like to open the graves up wide

Some day at noon, with the yellow sun

Hot on all the men and women who have died,

And shout them all up onto a green hillside,

And ask them which they'd rather be,

Dead, or like me,

Almost middle-aged going upstairs and down in a great hurry,

Guilty and glad, warm and cold, with wonder and with worry .

Laborer, lover, poet, parent, a man

Up in the morning to perfect a plan

At night unfinished; but almost finished; up again

The next day, despairing, talking, eating, delighting

In even a little of the plan perfected; writing;

And except for sorrow, nothing to do with the dead.

They'd say,

All shouting from the green hill,

Gathered in numberless thousands,

Let us get up again!

There was one more thing we had to do.

We were busy!

We were interrupted

By being dead!