From tomorrow Shraaddha will begin and conclude on September 21, 2025. This is considered an auspicious time when families honour their deceased ancestors by performing rituals like Pind Daan. 

This year, along with my parents, ancestors and not many well-wishers who contributed shaping in some way my life, I will also honour my wife, who left me last year December. Her death has slowed my heart but she stays with me, forever. 

Instead of my own elegy I’ll share one written by Ted Berrigam.

 
The first time, I heard the name Ted Berrigam, was through some article written by the Hindi poet Shrikant Verma – who wrote Magadh and Jalsaghar.

Like Ramdhari Singh Dinkar some of his lines are all-time relevant, like - 

जो भी हो,

जय यह आपकी है!

बधाई हो!

राजसूय पूरा हुआ,

आप चक्रवर्ती हुए—

वे सिर्फ़ कुछ प्रश्न छोड़ गए हैं

जैसे कि यह—

कोसल अधिक दिन नहीं टिक सकता,

कोसल में विचारों की कमी है!

(Anyway

The victory is yours!

Congratulations!

The Rajasuya is over,

You are a chakravarti—

They have left only a few questions

Like this one—

Kosala cannot last long,

Kosala is short of ideas!)

Shrikant Verma was invited as 'Visiting Poet' in the 'International Writing Programme' organised by the University of Iowa in 1970 -71 and 1978 and after coming back, wrote a very interesting book “Beesvi Shatabdi Ke Andhere Me”.

In fact, first time I read poems by some of the poets like the Mexican poet Octavio Paz were translated by him.

But here I want to write about Ted Berrigan (1934 – 1983), the American poet who founded C magazine in 1964. He and his second wife, the poet Alice Notley, were active in the poetry scene in Chicago for several years. 

Ted Berrigan's poem “People Who Died” is a list of people who died, including his grandfather, friends, and poets like Frank O'Hara and Woody Guthrie, whose deaths impacted Berrigan. The poem is deeply personal, documenting the loss of people who were close to the poet. 

It captures the process of mourning, with Berrigan expressing the raw emotion of grief through the simple, stark act of listing names and causes of death. 

Read on – 

Pat Dugan…my grandfather…throat cancer…1947.

Ed Berrigan…my dad…heart attack…1958.

Dickie Budlong…my best friend, 

when we were five to eight, 

killed in Korea, 1953.

Red O’Sullivan…hockey star & cross-country runner 

who sat at my lunch table

in High School…car crash…1954.

Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan…my friend, in High School,

Football & Hockey All-State…car crash…1959.

Cisco Houston…died of cancer…1961.

Freddy Herko, dancer…jumped out of a 

Greenwich Village window in 1963.

Anne Kepler…my girl…

killed by smoke-poisoning while playing

the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital                         

during a fire set by a 16-year-old arsonist…1965.

Frank O’Hara…hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.

Woody Guthrie…dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.

Neal Cassady…died of exposure, sleeping all night

in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.

Franny Winston…just a girl…totalled her car 

on the Detroit-Ann Arbor Freeway, 

returning from the dentist…Sept. 1969.

Jack Kerouac…died of drink & angry sickness…in 1969.

My friends 

whose deaths have slowed my heart 

stay with me now.

Brood over the last three lines.

(Courtesy: University of California Press, Selected Poems, with thanks)