The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

SUNDAY, 4 DECEMBER, 2005

Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem:"In The End," and "After," by Lucille Broderson from Beware. (Spout Press).

In The End

All that last day at the cabin,
the lawnmower held you up, you
who could barely stand.
You rammed and rammed the mower
into the raspberry thicket
until we had lawn
where we didn't need it,
didn't want it.


That night, holding you night pail,
your hand went limp. The warm yellow
flowed onto the pine floor, between the planks.
Your teeth clenched. You wailed, a high keening wail.


Once the sounds that came from your lips
were words. When you'd nick a finger
or bump a shin, you'd glare at me, say,
I'd better not get really sick,
you'd never be there.
Then the cancer grew in your brain
and each day you became less and less,
and I was there. Surprised, but I was there.

You were my little boy then, feet wide apart,
rolling around the house in a toddler's gait.
How I loved nuzzling your neck,
squeezing your shoulders. For days
I lay in your arms, sobbing.
You held me tight, your eyes wide,
no change at all on your face.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of one of the most prolific writers ever, Robert Payne, (books by this author) born in Cornwall, England (1911). He wrote The Mountain and the Stars (1937), and hundreds of other books, many under other names. He taught poetry and shipbuilding in China, became an authority on Indian art, wrote biographies and novels, and made English translations of Boris Pasternak and Søren Kierkegaard. He worked on five or six books at a time, and got most of his work done in the wee hours of the morning, between two and eight. He was asked how he had come to write so much, and he looked surprised and said, "If you write three or four pages a day, in a month you have one hundred pages."