Death in slow voices

1

New moon, face-down, drowning

or crescent: an arthritic knotted finger, furiously wagging

or full: a scream for the sun's remote fire , Munch's envy in limbo.

2

in the dead of the night I wake in a nightmare
feeling chased by shapeless terror

up and down an unending staircase of an Escher print,
down up down up down up

in the house I was born.

3

A native Indian smoking, looking over the prairie, grave of the buffaloes,
Manitou, Great Spirit, where are you now?

"I am tired of fighting from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more."

Death will call always out of season.

4

Way out of the door,
an exit, not always an entrance.

Walk in the church yard among the tombstones,
here lives white-shrouded Harry, his wedding band still on his bony fingers
and pretty Julia killed by a car crash,
and tiny Amy, who entered the world for no more than two hours.

A coffin is a memory box holding what has been given,
a body and a past

or a wide open eye that has closed its lid.

5

My young father resides
on top of many others in the cold Russian earth, his beautiful eyes closed a long time ago, November 1943. He never stopped whispering,

still speaks to me

and listens.

My mother is looking for him forever in her dreams.
Where is my Dad, Mum?" I ask
"wherever we go."

Tell her: Death is not always an exit but an entrance.

6

Maybe the moon is a slow tune
carried throughout time
by the green-winged Quetzal bird -

What else ages when not tended to:

memory, the Amazon forest,
ozone, a marriage,
the night

in which my young daughter suffered a stroke

papers of my grandfather's death and burial,

the call of the nursing home to say that my grandmother had just "passed away".

For over half a century , my grandfather's bones waited for his widow, waited
in a plot of earth underneath a willow tree and an ivy covered cross

for those papers to authorise my grandmother's request, while she adjusted
her new hearing aid. Down by her cold feet, he's still the man

she tries to hear.