We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion

Short Stories

We are all short stories though we want to be novels

The long kind, the Russian kind,

War and Peace, any of the Dickens titles.

The thing is, we rarely get beyond seventy or eighty pages,

Making us novellas at best,

Not in the game with Methuselah,

Not living long enough to figure out the ending,

Instead having to settle for hoping

We and the characters in our story

Will all get out of this mess alive.

We don't.

I don't mean to spoil the ending, but there you are.

--Alberto Rios

Death Comes Knocking at My Door

When I saw Death standing at my doorstep

I thought of the speech I long prepared.

“Why did you take them away, why so many?

Did you have to take Keith and Bill and Frederic

and Mahlon and Tim and Hunter and Kerry –

I could go on with the names all day.”

Sometimes when I compose this long rehearsed

speech, I also ask, “Why them and not me?”

All these words hung in the air unspoken

as I watched how tired Death looked.

Death's bones bowed with weariness.

“So, do you want to come in?” I asked.

Death gave no answer but walked in

and sat in my living room chair.

I dropped over the tired bones my favorite

afghan quilt knitted by my grandma.

I almost said, you are now wrapped by the

love of one more you stole, but held my tongue.

I made Death a cup of tea, who took it

gratefully. And we sat. In silence.

The strangeness of Death sitting in

my living room, covered by my grandma's

wool afghan, sipping tea wore off.

We were not strangers to each other.

Then Death stood, handed me the tea cup,

the afghan dropping to the chair.

As Death crossed my threshold I said,

“I suppose I will see you again one day.”

--Michael Kiesow Moore

From The Song Castle. Nodin Press © 2019.

Antidotes to fear of death

Sometimes as an antidote

To fear of death,

I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,

I suck them from the quenching dark

Til they are all, all inside me,

Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself

Into a universe still young,

Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,

The light of all the not yet stars

Drifting like a bright mist,

And all of us, and everything

Already there

But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough

To lie down here on earth

Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields

Of our discarded skulls,

Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,

Thinking: whatever left these husks

Flew off on bright wings.

--Rebecca Elson

the vantage point of death

 If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. 

- Ursula K Le Guin

One Version of Events

If indeed we were allowed to choose,
we must have been mulling things over for a long time.

The bodies offered us were uncomfortable
and wore out dreadfully.

The means of satisfying hunger
sickened us.
The passive inheritance of traits
and the tyranny of organs
put us off.

A world that was meant to surround us,
was in endless decay.
The effects of causes wreaked heavy havoc on it.

Of all those fates
given to us for inspection
most we rejected
in sorrow and horror.

Questions arose such as these:
what use is there in the painful delivery
of a dead child?
And why be a sailor
who never reaches port?

We agreed to death
but not in every form.
Love attracted us,
sure, but a love
that kept its word.

The fickleness of judgments
and impermanence of masterpieces
scared us off
from the service of art.

Everyone wanted a homeland without neighbors
and to live their entire lives
in the interval between wars.

None of us wanted to seize power
or be subject to it,
none of us wanted to fall victim
to our own delusions or anyone else’s.
There were no volunteers
for tight crowds, parades,
and even less so for vanishing tribes;
but without them, history
never would have been able to march on
through centuries foreseen.

Meanwhile a goodly number
of lighted stars
had gone out and grown cold.
It was high time for a decision.

After many reservations
there finally appeared a few candidates
for discoverers and healers,
for philosophers without acclaim,
for several anonymous gardeners,
musicians, and conjurers

—though for want of other submissions
even these lives
couldn’t be fulfilled.

The whole thing
had to be rethought yet again.

We were offered
a package tour,
a journey from which we’d return
fast and for certain.

A chance to remain outside eternity,
which is, after all, monotonous
and ignorant of the concept of passing,
might never have come again.

We were riddled with doubt
whether, knowing it all beforehand,
we indeed knew it all.

Is such a premature choice
any choice at all?
Wouldn’t it be better
to let it pass?
And if we are to choose,
to make the choice there?

We took a look at Earth.
Some adventurers were living there already.
A feeble plant
was clinging to a rock
with reckless trust
that the wind would not uproot it.

A smallish animal
was crawling out of its nook
with an effort and a hope that surprised us.

We found ourselves too cautious,
small-minded, and ridiculous.

Anyway, soon our numbers began to fade.
The least patient ones went off somewhere.
Theirs was a trial by fire
—that much was clear.
Indeed, they were lighting one
on the steep bank of a real river.

Several
were already heading back.
But not our way.
And as if they were carrying the spoils? Of what?

By Wislawa Szymborska, Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

--W.S. Merwin, from Migration: New and Selected Poems. 

Tomorrow

Tomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.

Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.

Drunk on music,
who needs wine?

Come on,
Sweetheart,
let's go dancing
while we still
have feet.

-- David Budbill

If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

--Ellen Bass

breathe back the breath

“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

They Say It’s the Best Bloom in Ten Years

She wants to go see the bluebonnets, she says.
This is after she tells me they’ve said she has three months to live.
And I want to find her vast fields of bluebonnets,
acres and acres of white-tipped blue bloom.
And I want to send her more springs to see them in,
more days to live one day at a time. I want to remove
the pain in her belly, the pain that aggressively grows.
I want to make deals with the universe. Want to say no
to the way things are. I want to tell death to wait.
I want to tell life to find a way. I want to hug her
until she believes she’s beloved. I want to give her
the pen that will write every brave thing
that she’s been unable to say. There are days
when we feel how uncompromising it is, the truth.
How human we are. There are days when the bluebonnets
stretch as far as the eye can see. There are days
we know nothing is more important than going to see them,
a billion blue petals all nodding in the wind, teaching us to say yes.

         —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The Immortal Part

When I meet the morning beam,
Or lay me down at night to dream,
I hear my bones within me say,
"Another night, another day.

"When shall this slough of sense be cast,
This dust of thoughts be laid at last,
The man of flesh and soul be slain
And the man of bone remain?

"This tongue that talks, these lungs that shout,
These thews that hustle us about,
This brain that fills the skull with schemes,
And its humming hive of dreams,—

"These to-day are proud in power
And lord it in their little hour:
The immortal bones obey control
Of dying flesh and dying soul.

" 'Tis long till eve and morn are gone:
Slow the endless night comes on,
And late to fulness grows the birth
That shall last as long as earth.

"Wanderers eastward, wanderers west,
Know you why you cannot rest?
'Tis that every mother's son
Travails with a skeleton.

"Lie down in the bed of dust;
Bear the fruit that bear you must;
Bring the eternal seed to light,
And morn is all the same as night.

"Rest you so from trouble sore,
Fear the heat o' the sun no more,
Nor the snowing winter wild,
Now you labour not with child.

"Empty vessel, garment cast,
We that wore you long shall last.
—Another night, another day."
So my bones within me say.

Therefore they shall do my will
To-day while I am master still,
And flesh and soul, now both are strong,
Shall hale the sullen slaves along,

Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone
The steadfast and enduring bone.

-- A. E. Housman

Death poems

Kiba, 1868, ae. 90

My old body:
a drop of dew
grown heavy at the leaf tip


Joseki, 1779, ae. 85

This must be
my birthday
there
in paradise


Ensei, 1725, ae. 69

A parting gift to my body:
just when it wishes
I'll breathe my last.


Fukaku, 1753, ae. 92

Empty cicada shell:
as we come
we go back naked


Kin'u, 1817, ae. 62

How leisurely
the cherry blossoms
bloom this year
unhurried
by their doom


Renseki, 1789, ae. 88

I cleansed the mirror of my heart
now it reflects the moon


Yamazaki Sokan, ~1540

Should someone ask where Sokan went,
just say,
he had some business in the other world


Kyoriku, 1715, ae. 59

Till now I thought that death
befell the untalented alone.
If those with talent, too, must die,
surely they make
a better manure?


Zosan Junku, 1308, ae. 76

You must play the tune of non-being yourself--
nine summits collapse, eight oceans go dry.


Inseki, 1765, ae. 67

I give my name back
as I step in
this Eden of flowers.


Toko, 1795, ae. 86

Death poems
are mere delusion:
death is death.


Japanese Death poems, Yoel Hoffman, Tuttle Publishing.
(It was traditional for Zen masters to compose poems as they were dying.)