Here you will find the Poem A Way To Make A Living of poet James Wright
From an epigram by Plato When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetery. Think of all I could Have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much. I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living. Thank you, no. I am going to take my last nourishment Of measure from a dark blue Ripple on swell on ripple that makes Its own garlands. My dead are the secret wine jars Of Tyrian commercial travelers. Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves Drift in and out of the Mediterranean. One of these days The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans, Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance, And waken, The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away. They are stars and snowflakes floating down Into your hands, love.
