A poem for Eve Sedgwick...

by J J Cohen

... by my colleague Margaret Soltan. Her lines

The dying coral, the marl's clay,
The bones of the dead that named the place Bone Key --
Consider these at noon, when the passion flower is red.
Consider these at ten, by the gulf and the sea.

Consider where the cancer spread.

haunt me on a morning when I am about to read to ninety students a sweetly sad song of mortality and transformation:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.