Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us] by Gregory Orr

This is what was bequeathed us:

This earth the beloved left

And, leaving,

Left to us.

No other world

But this one:

Willows and the river

And the factory

With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank

On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved's clear instructions:

Turn me into song; sing me awake.

--

About the author:

Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti.  He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.[...]

He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse.  Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines.  Some of the poems that deal explicitly with these incidents include "A Litany," "A Moment," and "Gathering Bones Together," in which he declares: "I was twelve when I killed him; / I felt my own bones wrench from my body."  In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."[...]

Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts.  In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.  He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.