Last Rights
​by Rob Hardy

We’ve reached the age when we start to think
about how we would like to die.
Not that we can preorder for delivery
in the still distant future. Death is a box
of parts delivered at birth, a thing we assemble
without instructions, not even knowing
what it will be, until at last we’ve assembled
a flight of stairs and we’re lying at the bottom.
If we could preorder, we would choose
to die in our sleep from natural causes.
A nurse or an aide would enter the room
and find our bodies laid aside like a book
we finished just before we turned out the light.
But these days we think more often of dying in protest,
not in bed, but under a banner, because death
is the last right that can’t be taken from us.
And sometimes we even think we’d like to know
the last thing we’re humanly capable of knowing,
a knowledge so final, so pure and impractical,
​it can never be used to make a poem or a bomb.
Rob Hardy lives in Northfield, Minnesota, where from 2016 to 2023 he served as the city’s first Poet Laureate. He’s the author of a full-length poetry collection, Domestication (2017), and two poetry chapbooks, The Collecting Jar (winner of the 2005 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition) and Shelter in Place (2022). His writing, both poetry and prose, has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including the Best of the Net.
A 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee, Hardy's poem can be found in Issue 31 of Glassworks.