Gabriel: A Poem

You may have read Alec Wilkinson's New Yorker profile this summer of his friend Edward Hirsch and the long poem he'd written about the death of his son, Gabriel. The poem came out last month, and it's as moving and memorable as the profile leads you to believe. Gabriel was a wild child—"Like a spear hurtling through darkness / He was always in such a hurry / To find a target to stop him," Hirsch writes—and the modest, wry, and cerebral language his father uses to recall him is one sign of his unwilling distance from the son he loved, and from the inexplicable cruelty of his early death. Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, it's an attempt to grieve through language, through reading and recounting—an attempt he knows can't help but fail.