Loss Attains Human Form

Front page headline the day you were born.
Consummate worrier, neurotic, and full
of self-loathing, you were frightened
of your own shadow, which streamed across
the ruined walls, begging, no, screaming
for release, for impossible, impossible escape.  

How you came to love the color blue, knowing
how it hid your sorrowed eyes, your deathless gaze,
your faceless features and colorless skin, brown, black,
blue? The world will never know. You hide yourself
too well, others are only
all too eager to vanish you out of view.

But enough of your faults, I know
how you shower the dead in flowers
as if their bright colors and living emblems,
both homage and tribute to the sun's miraculous
and terrible truth, could spread, efface
the fact of death from the lips of the unmoving
and the minds of the unmoved. I know well
how hard you had to work to get here.

You deserve better
than the tragedy of childhood, spent
believing in the blatant lie
of eternity among angels, sunshine.
The morning bears bright witness
to the loss of your innocence, which
like a world of its own
prepares itself to die.

I promise, learning
to hold your hand as we drift
across the rain-drenched forests
in the Land of the Dead, to find you
both in this world and the next, to sing
your praise, to bring offering of marbled lilies in June light
even if I am nothing but a ghost of the airborne world.