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(in Covid’s harvesting of lives)
Death, old-fashioned death, still defies all science.
Still, in this our age of the immortal image
Does it rob the substance and draw the silence
Out of each human face, to turn a page
That arouses our long-cherished notions
Of continuance, and in our emotions
Revivified, ever, since long ago,
That sustains memories of our forebears;
Necessity of funeral rites to show
A presence in the dead subliming ours,
How explained never the burning issue,
Assumed, a sense of being somewhere too;
But heraldic in that final repose,
Something unswayed by the sway of emotion -
Sometimes thought of, other times not - one knows
As to the concept of stillness in motion
That some call oblivion, and for that reason
Equate death with; in fact, a life-engaging season. |
