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Enjoy Your Release

Text of Poem

You better grow the
greenest grass you can
find among the gravestones
and a few flowers and an
ornamental shrub or two.
It’s somber enough just
to think of all those
buried hopes in your
autumn days. Maybe one more
grave would bury self-pity
too and then you would
be free to enjoy your
release from calendar
and weather. You’ve worked off
your debt to might-have-been,
and tramped the regret
circuit long enough. Remember,
friend, the Preacher said that a
merry heart driveth away care,
a sad face drieth the bones.

 

First Line
You better grow the
Original Pub Location
Original Publication Date
2017
Original Citation
Planting Red Geraniums: Discovered Poems of James Hearst. Final Thursday Press, 2017. 26.
Complete Poems
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Hearst Collections
Word Count
91
Manuscript

Permission to reproduce work from the James Hearst Papers has been granted by the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa Libraries.

Poetic Form
open
Themes