Thom Gunn - Lament

Your dying was a difficult enterprise.

First, petty things took up your energies,

The small but clustering duties of the sick,

Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric.

Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray

Or test (while you read novels two a day)

Already with a kind of clumsy stealth

Distanced you from the habits of your health.

In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin,

You tried to stay the man that you had been,

Treating each symptom as a mere mishap

Without import. But the...