It’s been a year since my father’s death and I’ve been remembering him in an unpredictable mix of dreams, reflections, and feelings. My heart still shifts around empty spots, and other spaces change shape as the memories I carry adapt to this moment’s inner and outer life. I’ve done a lot of remembering through the things he left behind, his writing looming large now as it did in his last years of life. One piece of writing stood out to me as a unique window into this period, a poem originally titled What is needed for Valhalla. I kept finding revisions of it in scattered places, different formats, and widely varying styles. Eventually I collected them and made an attempt to put them in sequence, and was deeply moved by what emerged. I wrote up some brief commentary, and my dear friend Peter Miles Bergman typeset it in a presentation that integrates some of my father’s handwriting and expresses my feelings about the work beautifully. We’re still working on getting it printed, but I thought I’d post this excerpt to mark the anniversary today.
The second and third page are landscape, scroll or zoom if needed to see everything.
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