Thomas Lynch

“I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while…

— Thomas Lynch

“The advance of our technology is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for ethical questions that ought to attend the implications…

— Thomas Lynch

Whatever’s there to feel, feel it – the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache…

— Thomas Lynch

“The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings,…

— Thomas Lynch

“The living have to live with it. You don’t. Theirs is the grief or the gladness of your death, theirs is the…

— Thomas Lynch

“When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past…

— Thomas Lynch

Whatever's there to feel, feel it—the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your…

— Thomas Lynch

... by doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

— Thomas Lynch

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

— Thomas Lynch

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part…

— Thomas Lynch

“There are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally…

— Thomas Lynch

I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

— Thomas Lynch

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort,…

— Thomas Lynch

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid…

— Thomas Lynch

“I will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let's eat, drink and be merry. Marriage is the public spectacle of private parts: cheque-books…

— Thomas Lynch

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations.…

— Thomas Lynch

“Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against…

— Thomas Lynch

“It was there, in the parlors of the funeral home---my daily stations with the local lately dead---that the darkness would often give…

— Thomas Lynch

“The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.”

— Thomas Lynch

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially…

— Thomas Lynch

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

— Thomas Lynch

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

— Thomas Lynch

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and…

— Thomas Lynch

“Sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep. Sometimes nothing at all much happens. Life goes…

— Thomas Lynch

“How much of what we do, from the ridiculous to the sublime, would not be done if we did not die? In…

— Thomas Lynch