Reflecting on life and death, which comes to us all

Personal: Two Poems for My Dad

My Dad

My dad at the end
down to ice water and pain

Last breath and his stretched skin over skull,
Looking like a turkey’s throat--

Cut through
No Thanks
---giving

The undertakers come,
the younger looking like a freshman on a date

Refuse collectors
Lift /it/—a skin bag of bones,
like a decrepit wrinkled carpet

Onto their white winding sheet,

Roll /it/ up like a fabric cigar and place /it/ on a gurney--

“Rolled away...
all the burials, rolled...”
They wheel the thing outside

barely missing a left
edge of his big screen TV

My dad/obsessively/watched like a Fox;
So mundane,

Death...

No burning light,
“no raging against the dying”...

Dad’s last act
--breathing with a tube and drinking;

Not quite, when I arrived
only 7 minutes before the Taker

And joined my mom and sister at his contraption bed,
I told Dad my last joke,

the 4 of /us all together/ he on hold/

My dad felt my hand--
Then not.

“That’s all folks.”

--


Deaf to Death

Am I still deaf to death
Even Dad’s demise?

Hard to ‘ear’ like him,
No mourn, only even
Less
because of all that immortal noise

The daily barrage of clamor

How can one imagine

Zero

0?

150,000 /zeros/ every day/sunset
around the global 0
spinning
in
the spaced black darkness;

We all await that last straw

Poked into eternity,

Like through a screen door in a tornado’d torrential storm;

Another human’s missing,
Only hole in water
after a finger’s withdrawn.

Billions in the past, no more, one less

Dusted to stars,
scattered to the cosmic wind,

No more,
Not even less;

Not even
Not.

-- To Dad.

Miss you.

Dan

Personal: Two Poems for My Dad

My Dad

My dad at the end
down to ice water and pain

Last breath and his stretched skin over skull,
Looking like a turkey’s throat--
Cut through
No Thanks
---giving

The undertakers come,
the younger looking like a freshman on a date

Refuse collectors
Lift /it/—a skin bag of bones,
like a decrepit wrinkled carpet

Onto their white winding sheet,

Roll /it/ up like a fabric cigar and place /it/ on a gurney--

“Rolled away…
all the burials, rolled…”
They wheel the thing outside

barely missing a left
edge of his big screen TV

My dad/obsessively/watched like a Fox;
So mundane,

Death…

No burning light,
“no raging against the dying”…

Dad’s last act
--breathing with a tube and drinking;

Not quite, when I arrived
only 7 minutes before the Taker

And joined my mom and sister at his contraption bed,
I told Dad my last joke,

the 4 of /us all together/ he on hold/

My dad felt my hand--
Then not.

“That’s all folks.”


--


Deaf to Death

Am I still deaf to death
Even Dad’s demise?

Hard to ‘ear’ like him,
No mourn, only even
Less
because of all that immortal noise

The daily barrage of clamor

How can one imagine

Zero

0?

150,000 /zeros/ every day/sunset
around the global 0
spinning
in
the spaced black darkness;


We all await that last straw

Poked into eternity,

Like through a screen door in a tornado’d torrential storm;

Another human’s missing,
Only hole in water
after a finger’s withdrawn.

Billions in the past, no more, one less


Dusted to stars,
scattered to the cosmic wind,

No more,
Not even less;

Not even
Not.



--

To Dad.

Miss you.

Daniel

Waking Up at the Funeral

a true event that happened almost 20 years ago--

Waking Up at the Funeral

Her face white-puffed, plastic
Rouged and lipped carmine,
Couched in the satin pillow;
Why am I in sorrow staring down
At this female corpse all dressed out?
I don’t know this thing!

The shock richters all the hell deep
To my marrow and mien, way down;
This is a fake mannequined second
Not my dear loved aunt in her final end.
I wake up at this funeral!

My deepened sorrow lightens--not her!
Yet I force myself to routed tradition
And stare down in fake meditation--
But where’s her so bony, scrawny face
Wrinkled to prune and those 50ish glasses?
I don't know this corpse!

Stray mutts played in her messy bathtub,
(The same size as this metal coffin);
Their residue reeking her house
While she placeed pet ads in the news
Making spending money on stray dogs.
Where have her shenanigans gone?
I don’t know this cadaver!

Even if this rigid painted thing had been
Modeled close to her formal portrait--
That hangs above like a small billboard
For the traffic of the bereaved--
I know this would not be her
Lying still and so stiffly proper;
I wake up at this funeral!

I remember her reading her Bible,
While 2 trained apes in her smelly room,
Gallivanted around in Huggies,
Bringing iced Cokes from the frig
To her skinny, bed-ridden self.
I don’t know this corpse!

Last week, she died of emphysema.
The certain pruning cuts us deep
To the ‘morrow,’ we who still remain,
But I do know, really, that my dear aunt
Is not here in this still, prim cadaver;
We wake up at this funeral!

I sigh in spiritual relief,
Though in sorrow, and walk
Buoyantly away--
Thank the Light! We awake!

by Daniel Wilcox


First published in Lunarosity;
republished by Diminuendo Press, Texas,
and then collected in 3rd book of published
poetry, selah river

I wrote this back when I thought liberal Christianity was true, and had--despite severe rational doubts--hope that death isn't the end of a human being.

Plus, beyond all belief or disbelief, I did experience, suddenly, as I stared into that coffin, the shocking awareness that the dead corpse wasn't my dear aunt. Not at all, not even if the mortuary hadn't disfigured her actual features.

I now have only a faint hope that human life continues after brain death. My father died this year. I wish to God, he is alive right now, but modern science has mostly disproven such a view.

However, none of that takes away from the fact that artificially made-up corpses and most funerals have nothing to do with the real alive loved one we knew.

When I die, I hope those in charge will follow the pattern of service explained in the novel Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card.

Even if Charles Hartshorne and so many other philosophers are correct--no, we aren't conscious after death, such a fact of sorrow doesn't change the truth
that
right NOW I am alive and can make a difference for the impoverished, the refugees, the persecuted, the abused, the hurting...

Let's live in the Light,

Let's light one candle each!


Daniel Wilcox