Updike reflects on his passing

Writer John Updike’s death made headlines this week, but in a poem due to be published later this year, he mused about his “overdue demise” being received with “a shrug and tearless eyes.”

The three-stanza poem, “Requiem,” will be published in Updike’s forthcoming collection “Endpoint” in September, said Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House.

Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.

The poem reads:

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise -- depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

Latimer said the publisher had received the collection, including “Requiem,” just a few weeks ago. He said two more books by Updike would also be published this year: “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories” in June and “The Maples Stories” in August.