Tag Archives: death

Pro forma

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It was an ordinary assassination,
A letting of blood only,
The high drama of philosophy
Utterly lacking

The way a believer
Will kill another, or an infidel,
While complaining of a shortage
Of votive candles.

Still, the sky opened as usual,
The souls of the dead collected
At the bottleneck of dogma,
The tedium of paradise

Only now becoming clear:
Muslims to the left,
Jews to the right,
Christians take a number

No waiting for atheists,
The difference between Heaven and Hell
Consisting of a single syllable,
A matter of interpretation

Death, and all that

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Only one thing is certain, and it is death.
Forget taxes: political posturing.
Plenty of people right here
in the land of the technically free
and occasionally brave
are too poor to pay taxes.

No one is too poor to die.
You will die,
and so will I;
all the people you’ve ever known,
and all you’ve never known,
will die.

You’ll miss them;
it will come as a shock.
Friends, enemies, bothersome acquaintances,
those you love, those you despise,
no matter.
Death will touch your heart,
because you will remember
that your own time is not yours to dictate,
that your death is not so remote.

When it happens to be someone you love,
who has been a part of your being,
it cracks the structure of your universe
from end to end.
You see a life severed, amputated.
There is a terrible urge to step in,
to finish things for them,
to see out their destinies, to hell with your own;
it will wait.

But you won’t,
you can’t.
The things undone, the lives unfinished,
the afterthoughts left adrift,
these will haunt you.
These ghosts will be your companions;
be good to them.

An autumn haiku

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Fall comes upon us
All gaudy and draped in red
Like yesterday’s blood

1914 III: The dead, by Rupert Brooke

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Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day here in the US.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.

Prothesis and ekfora

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prothesis and ekfora

The visitation was grand
All about me, wailing,
Giving the glad hand to
Each long lost long ago.

Afterwards
I lay flat in the coffin, feet first,
You leading the parade,
Somber with relief at such endings.

You were angry when I squirmed,
All the same,
Unable to keep my straight-laced face

In spite of the
Droning
Tolling
Bell.

I shouldn’t have taken it all
So lightly.
I should have let the gray noon settle slowly
On my unbeating heart
Like distant longing.

But you have to admit
The element of absurdity:
Me, refusing to lie still,
You, beside yourself
With propriety.