Elizabeth Childers speaks to her child, born only to die in childbirth as the mother herself dies in the last throes of labor.  The poem begins with a reference to the old phrase "Ashes to ashes and Dust to dust" by referring to the child as the dust of her dust, and in death they will be dust once more together:

DUST of my dust,   
And dust with my dust,
O, child who died as you entered the world,
Dead with my death!
Not knowing Breath, though you tried so hard,
With a heart that beat when you lived with me,
And stopped when you left me for Life.

Lamenting the experiences of life and telling her child that the pains of Life were well avoided, there's a bitterness -- and a touch of bittersweet -- in the telling, as befits the lament of a mother over such a heartwrending loss even as she herself is lost.  

And eyeless Nature that makes you drink
From the cup of Love, though you know it's poisoned;
To whom would your flower-face have been lifted?
Botanist, weakling? Cry of what blood to yours?--
Pure or foul, for it makes no matter,
It's blood that calls to our blood.

The calling of blood to blood -- the taste of love, poisoned in suggestion of heartaches that accompany humanity -- echoes the bond of mother and child, child and sibling, family and fellowship of all humanity; and yet, we the survivors who read the words of sorrow may yet sense the underlying tones.  We, the readers, may sense that beneath the sorrow there may yet lie a regret for the child never having the opportunity to experience life.

The piece is, in my opinion, a masterful delivery of mixed feelings and an insight into life that one can only imagine having had as one passes onward from this still-mortal coil.  The regrets of a mother for a child's life unlived rings particularly close to home for me; I've known the loss of a young one -- a nephew -- and can only imagine the impact upon his parents through my own sense of loss that pales in comparison.

But what of those who have lived life, if not to the absolute fullest then at least to a capacity where the life lived is one packed with wisdom, grace and experience?  Such is insight we gain from Master's epitaph for Lucinda Matlock, who relates her life of 96 years:

And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.

Truly, a woman who had lived and experienced quite a lot of loss in her own right, yet she was not jaded by the experience:

I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed--
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.

Her life still encompassed a great deal of living; her matter-of-fact recital of the day-to-day responsibilities mix with brief glimpses of happy times and fond memories.  

I need not imagine the words of Lucinda Matlock, were she to speak to us now about life and the ongoing crises constantly bemoaned in various circles about our leaders -- her words, through the work of Mr. Masters -- are there for all of us to ponder and to share, hopefully finding wisdom within them:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you--
It takes life to love Life.

Life is too strong for you -- It takes life to love Life.

I can see her point. We cannot allow ourselves to become mired in distractions and disappointments; loss and sorrow over the passing of relative or friend -- and of a nation's ideals -- must always be mourned, but the mourning itself should never replace or supplant life above all.  Living life is by far the best way to have, to share, and to give life.  Celebrating the lives of those we've shared ours with, mourning their passing and then continuing our own with others forever in our hearts and minds enables us to extend both our lives and theirs through our memories and experiences.

You can't "have lived" without dying, but dying without having lived is a real possibility.  We can't become trapped into constantly feeling regret for "might have beens" when we still have the capacity to achieve so much.

After all, life's worth living -- you just have to want it enough to work at it, and ideally share that "work ethic" with others.