American Life in Poetry
Kurt Brown was a talented poet who died in 2013, and his posthumous collection of selected and new poems opens with this touching late poem to his wife, Laure-Anne.
The Kiss
That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
The kiss I would have spent on you is still
There, within me. It will probably die there.
But it will be the last of me to die.
Copyright 2014 by the Estate of Kurt Brown, and reprinted from “I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: Poems Selected and New by Kurt Brown” (Tiger Bark Press, 2014), by permission of the Brown estate and Tiger Bark Press. American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.