Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours features poems by northern Illinois poets and a few from other states. Today’s featured poet is Susan Goldberg.
Goldberg lives in Rockford, but she grew up on a small farm near a town in Indiana. Goldberg’s sister Jane taught her to read in a tiny classroom--also known as their bedroom--before she started kindergarten. Goldberg said she briefly directed a grade school play, but that venture came to an abrupt halt when the actors complained that she was too bossy. Here’s her poem “The Last Laugh, or, On Leaving.”
When I am departed from this world, I want to have the last laugh. I want to leave some practical joke behind, like the fake rubber hand that my classmate extended to our high school principal as he was about to shake his hand to receive his diploma.
But what could this last laugh be? I won’t be there in person to put the joke in motion. Maybe it will be some humorous poem that I ask to be put right in the middle of the memorial service. Maybe I will have them invite the uber-hip comedian Reggie Watts to deliver the eulogy in another language that no one will understand. Maybe there will be a mime, delivering the message not in words but in exaggerated gestures, and then sprinting in place to direct people to the light luncheon following the service.
Or maybe I won’t need to plan anything at all. Maybe instead my writer friends and my actor friends will get together, sitting around a round wooden table in a darkened room, and write a script that will be performed, so that the people at the service will be laughing instead of crying.
That is how I would want to leave. Laughing.
