A Valediction for Mourning

an erasure of John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

go

now and say

tempests
were our joys
tell the

earth
what it meant

love love

love

endure

Like gold

no

come home

be to me

a
gun.

Carolyn Oliver’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, FIELD, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O'Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, where she now serves as a poetry editor. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Online: carolynoliver.net.