ManicDDaily

As followers of this blog know, my beloved father died a little over a week ago, and I’ve been going through various post-death machinations down in Florida where he lived, some difficult, some wonderful, some tedious, some eye-opening.

Here’s a poem written this a.m. (still perhaps a draft):

What You See

When you shut your eyes after the sight
of death, even
contained, the lidded
darkness tells you
to change your life–
”you there.”

You’d think
it would urge self-fulfillment–
all that grandiosity–but no–

“be kind,”
the darkness whispers.

“Kinder,” urges
that depth behind the eyes.

“Try,” it insists.  “Every
single day, every
next day.”

Though you stand in a grey box
of a room, looking out, variously, at a refrigerator
tank and an incinerator’s
portal, you still feel it–kindness–
it’s all you can breathe actually–
as it waits patiently for you to inhale,
inhale again.

This entry was posted on January 13, 2012 at 10:45 pm and is filed under poetry, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: cremation poem, manicddaily, poem about epiphanies after death of loved one, poem about kindness, post-death machinations