Edwin Honig was born Sept. 3 (Labor Day) in 1919. He'd be 93 today. I remember being at a wine & cheese thing after a poetry reading, sometime in the early 70s, when I was a freshman or sophomore at Brown. I had just read Edwin's long poem "Four Springs", and I said to him that this closing passage reminded me of John Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" ("O more than moon, draw not up tears,
to drown me in thy sphere...")
Edwin looked at me, & smiled, & said "You're making my hair stand on end."
13.
My heart is a love that I like and dislike a bit more,
a bit less, than a friend.
It turns like a world half-known that is huge and cold
as the moon still-a-moon,
And you don't remember me, it says, because
I've always been there.
You bear with me as you would with a parent you care for
more the less that you see,
the longer you live to remember as younger
than you are now.
Oh world, my heart, as you live and sleep, remember me
less and less,
but bear with me to wake to the stars and the moons
always there to land on
in dreams when the earth, grand mother-father of life,
is no longer there.
