Ursula K. Le Guin: Late in the Day

[bibliogramma]

Ursula K. Le Guin is dead.

I have no words now, may never have the right words, the best words. Ursula Le Guin has been more than a favourite author to me, she has been an inspiration, and a guide to living a feminist life. She showed me that you must never stop fighting, stop learning, and that you must never stop interrogating your own thinking, never rest, satisfied that you have the answer. She taught me how to live always questioning, always caring, always growing, even though you may not be able to do all the things you could do before.

She will always be with me. With us.

Her latest volume of poetry, Late in the Day, was sitting in my queue of books to read on the day I heard of her death. And so in memory of Ursula, I read these precious words, the distilled images and ideas of a lifetime of honestly searching, fearlessly caring, passionately fighting, gloriously dreaming. Today is not, for me, a day to analyse, but to feel, to be, to fly once more with this great spirit.

Among many other things, these are indeed the poems of a person writing late in their day. There are poems here that speak of summing up, of letting go, of reflection and resolution. There are other poems, too, that speak of her great love for nature and life, of her awareness if the universe embodied so beautifully in ordinary things, of a Taoist worldview, of all the many elements and aspects of a great life, greatly and gratefully lived. But today, I am attuned to the poems of ending. In reading them, I feel that I am hearing Le Guin slowly, and joyfully, saying goodbye.

Untongued I turn to still
forgetting all I will.
Light lies the shadow
on the way I go.