People dying all around, it seems. Old friends, old enemies, sometimes in one and the same person. I, too, am in that queue somewhere. Prompting this senryu:
Time passes
And so, too,
All our asses
Passages
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Tag Archives: death
Elegy
Another sailor slips the pier
To the swift beyond
No waiting in this queue
Will call when your turn comes up
No use guessing
No use jumping the line
It’s crossed in all due time
How we push and pull
Unaware, apparently, that
No effort speeds or hinders
We play the waiting game
Doing our best to be useful
All the while missing the point
Looking in vain for our ship to come in
Across our own waning gunwales
The undiscovered country
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will …
~ Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1
These borders are flimsy
You wonder how they hold
You don’t see the other side
You don’t see past the mirror
Soiled with hope and love
You wonder how the place can hold
A history’s worth of grief
All the loved and despised
All the grand and homely
The celebrated and unnoticed
But mostly the long forgotten
The teeming ranks of lives gone by
Every one sworn to remembrance always
Blessed by sacraments
Or cursed into sullen graves
You may lunge at these borders
Or flinch or simply watch
But no one crosses from there
Though some claim to have gone and returned
These ghosts live only through you
Breathe only with your lungs
In a country still undiscovered
A tanka for summer
A photograph:
Fields the color of winter
Nothing growing, nothing moving,
Just you, looking over your shoulder
As if I could still touch you.
O Captain My Captain, by Walt Whitman
A poem about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the only poem by Whitman using standard meter and rhyme. Perhaps he thought the occasion required something more formal. Goose bumps.
O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up–for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
exiles child 