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: irony
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
I heard of a shaman
I heard of a shaman
Who learned a peyote song
From the generator of his car
On the way to the ceremony
At which he sang full throated
The lesson of the Burning Way
The only summers I remember
The only summers I remember
Were so long ago the moss grew
And contracted, gray and brittle of
Such age and unworthiness
Grassy refuge fell and tumbled house
Disappeared from reality
Mists grew before eyes unable
Or unworthy to let go
The only summers worth summoning
Seem to pull yet further as fall
Without shame intervenes
And treeless leaves gather
And blow begone with no regard
For foot-dragging eye-squinting
Mumble-dim revision
Or re-visioning
The only summers’ slowly fading
Leaving traces only
Flickering transitory ghosts
But the worst of it is the sheer
Lack of spectacle the way lovers long gone
Become mere characters in your story
exiles child 