An Exchange Of Gifts

Lately, I’ve been thinking of my life and the people in it as gifts.  I love this poem because it shows that a poet never extinguishes her pen-not even in death:

 An Exchange of Gifts

As long as you read this poem

I will be writing it.

I am writing it here and now

before your eyes,

although you can’t see me.

Perhaps you’ll dismiss this

as a verbal trick

the joke is you’re wrong;

the real trick

is your pretending

this is something

fixed and solid,

external to us both.

I tell you better:

I will keep on

writing this poem for you

even after I’m dead.

by Alden Nowlan