The Farewell Issue / October 3, 2026

Open Door · Parting Hymns · Last Stanza · Homeward

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Welcome to The Farewell Issue, where every goodbye gets space for a proper farewell. Everything here stands at a doorway and takes its time.

Inside, my poem called "More Time" counts the years through one doorway. In Echoes, I discuss two wordsmiths who sang at the end of their worlds. In Devices, I watch six words gather at the door. And in Testaments, I sit with a man settled into a lifelong goodbye. Until we meet again.

Fare well,
Jason
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​jasonzguest.com​

In this issue:

Featured Poem More Time A doorway keeps the count of every leaving. Echoes Two Songs for the End of the World Two men answered the end of their lives in song. Devices The Last Stanza at the Door Six words gather at a threshold for one goodbye. Testaments The Goodbye He Carried Home A poet learned to write his farewell as homecoming.

Featured Poem

More Time

More Time
​By Jason Z Guest

Through the doorway,
laughter flees the shelter beneath my desk.
Toting sweet giggles of shine
Little plump legs spin,
swishing
away in allegro time.

Ages later
the footfalls chase fur and bouncing ball.
"Look, Daddy!" they chime,
an innocent clamor I welcome,
developing
through the doorway of mine.

Through the doorway
in protests of beet-red sweat,
weighted backpacks sign
of a fleeting youth standing tall,
sprouting
like the trellis vine.

Now, with a foundation
in truth and reverence sown,
For more of every moment, I pine.
Two precious gifts enter this world,
departing
through the doorway of mine.

About Jason →

Echoes · On This Day, October 3

Two Songs for the End of the World

Francis of Assisi died on the evening of October 3, 1226, 800 years ago this Saturday, lying on the bare ground at his own request. Two years earlier, sick and nearly blind, he had composed the Canticle of the Creatures, one of the earliest poems written in Italian. Tradition holds that he added one last verse as death drew near and asked his brothers to sing the whole canticle over him. His farewell arrived as a song of praise.

On this same date in 1967, Woody Guthrie died in New York. Thirty-two years earlier, he stood in Pampa, Texas, as the worst dust storm of the decade rolled over the Panhandle and convinced the town that the world had reached its end. He answered the dark with a song called "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh."

Seven centuries apart, two men met the end of their world with music, and the world still knows both songs by heart.

Step inside the song Francis carried into his last evening.

Read the Full Canticle →

Devices

The Last Stanza at the Door

An envoi is the short stanza that closes certain old forms, and its name comes from an Old French verb meaning to send someone on their way. Medieval poets used it to figuratively walk a finished poem to the door, often with a parting word. In a sestina, the envoi shrinks to three lines. All six end words that the poem has repeated through every stanza must return together for one last look before the poem sends them into silence.

​
​Elizabeth Bishop knew that doorway. Her father died before her first birthday, and her mother was committed to an institution when Bishop was five, so her grandparents raised her in Nova Scotia until her father's family brought her to Massachusetts. Her "Sestina" opens with September rain falling on a house where a grandmother and a child sit by the stove. The envoi begins with a line that sounds like weather and lands like a goodbye.

Nobody in the poem says the word goodbye. The envoi carries every word of that kitchen to the door at once, and that gathering becomes the farewell itself.

Sit down at that kitchen table and hear the whole poem read aloud.

Listen to "Sestina" →

Testaments

The Goodbye He Carried Home

​Alfred Tennyson spent most of his life inside one goodbye. In the autumn of 1833, word reached him that his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna at twenty-two after a blood vessel burst near his brain. Hallam had been engaged to Tennyson's sister, Emilia. Within two or three days of the news, Tennyson began writing short elegies for the friend he never had the chance to see off. He kept writing them for seventeen years.

Those poems became In Memoriam A.H.H., published in 1850. Tennyson named his first son Hallam. The farewell he never got to say became the ground he built a life on, and the grief became one of the defining poems of the Victorian age.

Then, in October 1889, at eighty and newly recovered from a serious illness, he boarded a ferry from Lymington to the Isle of Wight. During the twenty-minute crossing, on the back of an envelope, he wrote sixteen lines about putting out to sea at evening.

His son Hallam called the poem the crown of his father's life's work. Shortly before he died, Tennyson told Hallam to put "Crossing the Bar" at the end of every edition of his poems, so each book would close on the same goodbye.

He died at Aldworth on October 6, 1892, with moonlight at the window and a volume of Shakespeare open under his hand. The poem was sung at his funeral in Westminster Abbey. The young man who spent seventeen years unable to finish one farewell had learned, by the end, how to write his own as a homecoming.

Board the ferry with him and read all sixteen lines.

Read "Crossing the Bar" →