For today’s Wordsmith Wednesday, I offer a poem I wrote shortly after Phil Hartman was murdered in 1998.
On the Death of Phil Hartman
A comedian dies, and suddenly
the world explodes into
a nuclear array of light. It’s not funny
how he died, bang with a bullet.
Or how crowds cheer
the demise of another country, not realizing
their own is near. What is funny is
how he brought characters to the screen,
but never his own,
how a mushroom cloud is like a lotus
flower opening its petals,
how the clock can be pushed forward
by actions in New Delhi, Islamabad.
“I think laughter is an underrated emotion,”
he once told Jane Pauley on Dateline.
It’s what the world needs now,
what could have been written
as an epitaph on his gravestone
if he had not chosen
to be cremated instead.
His wish to be consumed by fire
no longer seems bizarre;
perhaps it was just foretelling what was
and is, and is to come.
I miss Phil. Warren says this quite often as well.
Interesting way to weave the “unimportant” with the “important.”