Three Funerals

I.

How is it measured:

The distance between points,

Each step a thousand miles

Reached in an echoed whisper,

Through cold water flats

And shotgun shacks,

On street corner bus stops,

Or behind shades,

Sung to fevered babies.

The wet dew frozen

Freezes once lush blades,

Now brittle and crushed

Under once confident steps,

Become halted and heavy.

The wind stings, the trees naked,

Showing no hope of thaw.

Gone the raspberry afternoons

Spent in antique gazebos

In the park by the dry canal,

As the July thunder calls out

To the rain waiting in clouds

For the moment  to burst,

Saturated, sustaining green life.

Gone that moment you first realized

That you were holding your

Future tight to your chest.

II.

She was tall and proud and beautiful,

And she was broken down the middle.

Try as I might I can’t put my eyes

Into hers to see what she saw.

Flesh of my flesh,

Bone of my bone,

The blood of my soul,

Where are you now?

It is a pain I will never know,

This pain that I sing of,

An agony not to be

Sung of in ignorance

But foolishly, perhaps, I do.

Since the harvest was too soon.

The furrows too deep.

You, specter I do fear

more than the others

Your lesson too clear

Wrapped in the shadow

I do not want to enter.

We parted the place wanting to forget,

Setting out to anaesthetize memory.

Some hid alone, I hid with the pack,

But my one companion were those eyes

Whose soul was fissured by a crack

     

III.

In the simplicity of black and white

There is more truth than in color,

Which is simply garish and vulgar

With all its hypnotically distorted hues.

The monochrome is like a chart 

Tracing a line shot from the past

Into the present future;

A bruised heart wrapped

In an innocent, knowing smile.

I’m glad the shadow drew me away,

A merciful shield from the flesh

That laid like melting clay,

To point me to the past,

A reminder of what’s to come.

Not just of plain oak boxes

Or the torture before she succumb

To the cold plot dug deep.

So that these images do not melt me

And drive me to the anesthesia,

And hollowed eyes and wrinkled faces,

Creased by tears of a barren house,

But lead to what is new, what is real.

What is true, what is Risen.