The final song at your funeral was, “How Can I Keep From Singing?” And I choked on my own tears and could not give those words flight to meet you. “You should sing at the top of your lungs at least once a day,” you advised your children, singing as you washed dishes, mowed the lawn, stood beside us in the pews on Sundays, as you tucked us in at night. I want you to know not a day went by that I didn’t sing out loud, usually in the shower, both loudly and badly. I sang parody lyrics to match events in the world around me, usually from cheesy 80s songs. When Covid struck, I could not sing for weeks. I felt too heavy to lift the words from my lungs, too fearful in uncertainties to belt out loud sound. This past week, I began to sing again, loudly and badly. I can hear your funeral song in my head, and I now have two answers to the question, “How Can I Keep From Singing?”<\/p>\n
[Prompt 4: Write an epistolary poem that is a letter from you to someone who has passed and\/or someone you have not seen in a long time.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The final song at your funeral was, “How Can I Keep From Singing?” And I choked on my own tears and could not give those words flight to meet you. “You should sing at the top of your lungs at least once a day,” you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":742,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64765,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64593\/revisions\/64765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}