101 Poems, Number 16

Favorite Poems Throughout My Life

16: “After I Heard You Were Gone,” in Horoscopes for the Dead, 2011, by Billy Collins* (1941–)

So how can Billy Collins know

So much about the shock of loss?

And how does he find words to show—

To make it smoothly come across?

The strangeness when a life is gone—

The loneliness that we all feel

When we can no more look upon
A friend, a love—the world’s surreal.

*Poet Laureate of the United States, 2001–03.

Link to poem.