Beckett, Samuel: Mort de A. D.

and there to be there still there

pressed against my old plank scabbed with black

days and nights blindly ground

to being there and to not fleeing and fleeing and being there

bent toward the avowal of time dying

of having been what was does what it did

to me to my friend dead yesterday gleaming eye

long teeth panting in his beard devouring

the life of saints a life by day of life

reliving in the night its black sins

dead yesterday while I lived

and to be there drinking above the storm

the guilt of time irremissible

gripping the old wood witness to departures

witness to returns

The death of Dr. Arthur Darley, who was at Saint-Lô with Beckett in 1945 and whose death from tuberculosis in December 1948 (at age thirty-five). Beckett memorialized in the poem "Mort de A. D."