Tuesday, November 2, 2021

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after a finger’s withdrawn.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

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