To make sense of death is
To make sense of life.
I thought myself
Prepared for grief while
Watching a movie in which
Tears poured down faces
Coalescing with rain
Flowing over black umbrellas
Over black dresses
Into softened Earth.
I fancied myself
Emotionally adept
When tears ran down
My own cheeks
And the heartache of a
Symphony of
Near misses
Burned my soul;
You leaving,
You coming back,
You loving me,
You leaving again,
And so on.
But when my mother told me
In passing through the kitchen,
Me slamming cupboards
Open and closed
In search of an elusive
Measuring cup,
That you had passed away,
It feels cliché to say that
It didn’t feel real and yet
It didn’t feel real,
Not in some sort of
Numb, frozen, shocked way,
But because in my mind
Your pristine image,
Capital “Y” You,
Exists untarnished,
As real as if I had
Dialed your number
You’d have picked up
And, hearing your smile,
I would berate my mother
For trying to convince me
That heaven is not on Earth.
Death in America is unlike
Death anywhere else in the world.
A nation of immigrants,
Away from hearth
And ancestors
And solid ground
We float in our
City in the sky,
Unaware that
Heaven is not next door
But concealed behind some
Bookshelf,
Long forgotten.
