New poem: "The Great Writer's Dilemma"

 The Great Writer’s Dilemma

At the midpoint of his precocious life 

at the age of thirty-six, John Hoyer Updike

wrote “Midpoint,” his summing-up poem,

concluding his confessional mid-life narrative 

with the metanoic declaration: “Deepest in the 

thicket, thorns spell out a word. /Born laughing,

I’ve believed in the Absurd, /Which brought me 

this far; henceforth, if I can, /I must impersonate 

a serious man.” And so serious did he become, 

that just before passing over to the Other Side 

at the age of 76 of stage four lung cancer, he 

assembled and wrote his final book, “Endpoint 

and Other Poems,” summing up his prodigious 

life with the hopeful lines: “The tongue reposes 

in papyrus pleas, /saying, Surely—magnificent, 

that ‘surely’— /goodness and mercy shall follow 

me all /the days of my life, my life, forever.” He 

died with his antinomian faith intact, unresolved 

of his dual nature, a “proper man” to the sad 

end of his unfulfilled life. Nearing the endpoint 

of my own life, time’s winged chariot draws 

near; but I’ve resolved the divine paradox 

of the great writer’s dilemma, and I have 

no need to come back again.