An Elegy for Ed Galing in the Form of a Letter to the Deceased by Alan Catlin

An Elegy for Ed Galing in the Form of a Letter to the Deceased

Dear Ed,


“I wake up
to the sadness
of being seventy"

               

Ed Galing and Harmonica

the poet Maia Penfold wrote some years ago,

reflecting how beautiful the world looked from

outer space and how, here, on earth, we dishonored

ourselves, fought senseless wars, persisted in all

forms of cruelty to our fellow men. I can only

imagine what you might add to her reflections

with regards to human follies without end.

At 96, you wrote about having lived too long,

of the loneliness, missing, most of all, your wife

of sixty-seven years, gone now for many years.

You wrote of constant pain, how helpless you felt

in a wheelchair and of the one remaining joy of your

life, writing poems. Those poems you typed , badly,

slowly, on a manual machine and mailed to small

press magazines no one ever heard of but your friends,

mostly fellow poets, who loved you and your work.

I can’t express how much I admired your needing

to write and how that was inextricably linked to your will

to live, when nothing else seemed to matter; the writing

kept the love alive, all those people you cherished

nearby. That last week you wrote letters to old friends

suggesting this was the end. I wrote back, a day late,

right away; after all you never know which one might

be the last one. I’ll cherish my last letter from you though

you’ll never know what I had to say.

love,

alan